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Chantilly Apple Sauce (With Horseradish)
Pare, core and cut in quarters, five medium-sized Greenings. Cook with very little water; when quite dry, rub through a fine purée strainer. To the pulp add one-half cup granulated sugar, five tablespoons grated horseradish, then fold in an equal quantity of whipped cream. Serve at once with roast goose, ducks or goslings.
A cold sauce built in three stages — dry apple purée, raw horseradish, whipped cream — and it lives or dies on the last minute of assembly.
- Fold and serve, no waitingWhipped cream will slacken and weep into an acidic purée fairly quickly, and grated horseradish loses its heat to the air. Have the purée cold and the goose carved before the cream goes in.
- GreeningsRhode Island Greening, a firm, sharply acid cooking apple still grown in the Northeast but rare in supermarkets. Bramley, Granny Smith or any tart apple that collapses when cooked will do; five medium apples is roughly 1 3/4 lb.
- "When quite dry"This is the step that matters after the folding. Cook covered with two or three tablespoons of water, then uncover and drive off the moisture, stirring, until the pulp mounds on the spoon. A wet purée will thin the cream to soup.
- Fine purée strainerA food mill or a drum sieve. A tamis or a stiff sieve worked with a wooden spoon gives the same result; skip the blender, which whips air into the pulp and makes it slick.
- HorseradishFive tablespoons of freshly grated root is assertive. Grate it in a ventilated spot; the volatiles are fierce. If using jarred prepared horseradish, drain it well and adjust to taste, since its heat varies with age and the vinegar it sits in.
- "An equal quantity"Equal in volume to the sweetened apple-and-horseradish mixture, measured after whipping. Expect about 1 1/2 cups of purée, so roughly 3/4 cup heavy cream whipped to soft peaks.
- SugarHalf a cup is calibrated to a very tart apple. With a modern dessert apple, add half and taste; the sauce should read sour and hot before the cream goes in, since the cream mutes both.
- YieldAbout 3 cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside a goose. It does not keep — make only what will go to the table.
"Chantilly" in an early twentieth-century American cookbook means one thing: sweetened whipped cream, a name generally traced to the kitchens of the Château de Chantilly north of Paris and often attributed to its 17th-century maître d'hôtel Vatel, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. What sits underneath the cream here is older and more northern — the Central European pairing of grated apple and horseradish, Apfelkren in Austria, served with boiled beef and with fat roast birds because the acid and the heat cut through goose grease. Elizabeth Hiller's book, generally dated 1915, assigns each Sunday of the year a full menu; this sauce is the French-trained finishing touch laid over a thoroughly German idea, which is a fair description of a good deal of American hotel cookery in the years before the First World War.