Mariner's Seafood Cocktail Sauce

We don't use a lot of cocktail sauce; in fact we've probably used less than four or five tablespoons of commercial cocktail sauce in our home in all 48 years of our marriage. Once in a great while, however, we buy or make something (usually a seafood dish) that just demands to be complemented by that piquant combination of flavors.

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This morning for breakfast my Honey decided to treat me with an egg dish that contains crab and cream cheese. I normally love that dish "barefoot", as we like to call it, but this time I was ready for something a little more stimulating, and the idea of cocktail sauce came to mind.

Now, since we don't regularly use cocktail sauce, we never buy it, and so we don't have any available for those rare occasions that call for it; so if I wanted to have some with my breakfast, I would either have to run to the store (on a Labor Day weekend!) or figure out how to make it myself.

After researching available cocktail sauce recipès on the web, I found that nearly every one of them started out with ketchup and horseradish, and most added lemon juice to the list of ingredients. Many others included optional ingredients such as Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco sauce as well. There was no widespread agreement on the amounts and relative proportions of these components - in fact they fluctuated wildly! Also, most recipès also yielded 'way more product than we are likely to use before it spoils; so it was time to do what I have come to regard as my SOP under these circumstances: I "rolled my own", modifying the information I had found in order to meet my requirements.

What follows, while it mostly contains a number of the same basic ingredients as all of those other recipès, is tweaked to meet our tastes as well as volume requirements.

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Suggested Equipment:

• Common kitchen measures and tools
  
• Mise bowl
  

Ingredients:

Item		Amount
Ketchup	Tomato	3½	Tbs
Sauce	Horseradish	½	tsp
Juice	Lemon	1	tsp
Sauce	Worcestershire	½	tsp
Sauce	Pepper, hot; e.g., Texas Pete®	⅛	tsp
Cilantro	Dry, ground	⅛	tsp

Directions:

Mix all of the ingredients thoroughly and refrigerate the sauce for a minimum of 30 minutes. Longer is better (to a point).

Makes about ¼ cup.

We used this sauce with my Honey's special crab-and-cream cheese eggs this morning, and it was a winner! Even my Honey approves, and she doesn't do cocktail sauce!