The Complete Handbook of Cocktail Sauce

Chapter 1: Understanding Cocktail Sauce

Open a restaurant kitchen's walk-in cooler and you will find one. Examine the prep station of a catering company and it will be there. Stand behind a seafood market counter on a Saturday morning and you will be portioning it by the quart. Cocktail sauce is one of the few condiments that appears on both the cheapest and most expensive tables in the country, from a fried clam shack in Massachusetts to a white-tablecloth raw bar in New Orleans. It is also, despite its ubiquity, one of the most poorly understood products in the commercial kitchen. This chapter establishes what cocktail sauce actually is, what is happening at a chemical and sensory level when you serve it, and why that understanding translates directly into better purchasing, better storage, and better food.

Let us start with a definition that is precise enough to be useful. Cocktail sauce is a cold, spoonable condiment whose primary flavor is defined by a sharp, acetous tomato base and a pronounced heat derived from horseradish. The classic American version, the one that is served with shrimp cocktail, oysters, and fried seafood platters, is a mixture of tomato ketchup, prepared horseradish, lemon juice or another acid, and aromatics such as Worcestershire sauce, celery salt, and Tabasco-style pepper sauce. That is the baseline. But the category is broader than this single recipe. A continental or Eastern European version may replace ketchup with a blend of tomato paste and vinegar, producing a tarter, thinner