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Horseradish Vinegar

A vinegar infused with horseradish, shallot, and cayenne pepper, left to steep for a week.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and shallot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Horseradish Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Infuse

  1. Pour 4 cups of vinegar over 3 ounces of scraped horseradish and 1 ounce of minced shallot.

  2. Add 1 teaspoon of cayenne pepper.

  3. Let the mixture stand for a week.

Strain and bottle

  1. Strain and bottle the clear liquid.

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. Horseradish + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Horseradish + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Vinegar + shallottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Vinegar + horseradishtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,609 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Vinegar
Acts as the liquid base that extracts and carries the horseradish and shallot flavour.
Horseradish
Supplies the sharp, pungent heat that flavours the vinegar.
Shallot
Adds a mild savoury onion note that rounds out the sharpness.
Cayenne pepper
Adds additional background heat to the infused vinegar.

Swap the shallot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, horseradish, pepper):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Radishfits about as well
  3. Cabbagefits about as well
  4. Shallotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, horseradish, pepper. 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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