Cocktail sauce substitutes

This is the actual recipe, it needs no cooking, and it tastes considerably fresher and less sugary than a bottled sauce.

Best for

shrimp cocktail, oysters and clams, fried seafood, crab cakes

Start at one tablespoon of horseradish and work up - brands vary wildly in strength, and a fresh jar can be three times as fierce as an old one. Let it sit ten minutes in the fridge so the horseradish heat spreads through the ketchup. If it tastes flat, it almost always needs more lemon rather than more horseradish.

The old-school American version, using tomato chilli sauce instead of ketchup for a slightly chunkier, spicier base.

Best for

shrimp cocktail, oysters, cold seafood platters

Bottled chilli sauce is less sweet, more savoury and carries onion, celery and clove notes, so the finished sauce tastes more complex and a bit thinner than the ketchup version. You will usually want less added Worcestershire because the chilli sauce is already doing that job.

The best fix when there is no horseradish in the house, because mustard delivers the same up-the-nose heat from the same family of compounds.

Best for

shrimp, fried fish and calamari, crab, dipping sauce for chips

It tastes clearly mustardy rather than horseradishy, which most people will not object to but a purist will spot - sharper on the front of the tongue and less of a sinus hit. Chinese hot mustard gets closer to horseradish than Dijon does; yellow mustard is too vinegary and turns the sauce muddy in colour.

A different sauce entirely, but the one already sitting in most fridges that seafood genuinely wants.

Best for

fried fish, calamari, fish cakes, shrimp

Creamy, mayonnaise-based, herby and pickly rather than sharp, sweet and tomato-red, so a shrimp cocktail made with it becomes something more like a prawn mayonnaise - richer, softer, less bracing. It is excellent with anything fried and slightly wrong beside cold shrimp on ice, where you want acid cutting through rather than fat piling on.

Uses wasabi as the heat source, which works because most tubed wasabi is horseradish and mustard anyway.

Best for

shrimp and prawns, seared tuna, sushi-style platters, crab

The heat is nearly identical to horseradish; what changes is that the sauce goes slightly green-brown if you use ketchup, and it carries a faint mustardy note. Add the wasabi at the last minute - its punch fades within half an hour, so a sauce mixed in the morning will taste tame by dinner.

The honest answer for raw oysters when there is no ketchup or horseradish: a different classic sauce that does the same job better than a bad improvisation.

Best for

raw oysters, clams, cold shellfish

Sharp, clean and completely non-sweet, so it tastes nothing like cocktail sauce but achieves the same result of cutting through brine and richness. Let the shallot sit in the vinegar fifteen minutes to soften. Do not offer this as cocktail sauce at a party - offer it as a mignonette and it will be more welcome than a red sauce made from ketchup and nothing else.