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Clam Cocktail Sauce

A tangy sauce made with lemon juice, horseradish, onions, Worcestershire, Tabasco, ketchup, peppers, and seasonings, served with clams.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Clam Cocktail Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Juice the lemons into a bowl.

  2. Add the horseradish, grated onion, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco sauce, catsup, sweet Spanish peppers, green peppers, black pepper, and coarse sea salt. Mix well.

Serve

  1. Cut the grapefruit in half and remove the core from each half.

  2. Place about 8 small clams in each grapefruit half.

  3. Spoon the sauce over the clams.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Lemon + grapefruittop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Horseradish + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Lemon + horseradishtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,155 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Pepper + grapefruittop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together117 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and balances the sweetness of the catsup.
Horseradish
Adds sharp heat that cuts through the richness of the clams.
Catsup
Provides sweetness and body as the base of the cocktail sauce.
White onion
Adds sharp, pungent flavor and moisture to the sauce.

Swap the grapefruit

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, horseradish, onion, sauce, pepper, clam):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Grapefruitthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, horseradish, onion, sauce, pepper, clam. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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