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Hot Horseradish Sauce
1/4 cup freshly grated horseradish. 1/4 cup fine cracker crumbs. 1½ cups milk. 3 tablespoons butter. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 1/8 teaspoon pepper. 1 tablespoon vinegar. 2 tablespoons lemon juice. ½ tablespoon grated onion.
PROCESS: Cook crumbs, horseradish and milk twenty minutes in double boiler. Add seasonings, vinegar and lemon juice slowly, stirring constantly. Add grated onion, reheat and serve.
A crumb-thickened sauce rather than a roux one, meant for boiled beef or a roast. It works as written; the points below cover the parts that behave differently in a modern kitchen.
- Add the acid last, off the heatVinegar and lemon juice into hot milk will curdle it if hurried. Pull the top of the double boiler off the water, then trickle the acid in while stirring; the crumbs help hold the emulsion together but they will not rescue a sudden dose.
- Fine cracker crumbsSoda crackers or saltines crushed to a fine powder. If you use saltines, cut the half teaspoon of salt back to a pinch and season at the end.
- Fresh horseradishA knob of root, peeled and grated on a rasp, in a well-ventilated spot. Bottled prepared horseradish is already in vinegar, so if you substitute it use about 1/3 cup drained and reduce the tablespoon of vinegar to a teaspoon.
- Heat kills the heatTwenty minutes of cooking drives off most of the pungency. If you want the sauce sharp, hold back a spoonful of grated root and stir it in at the very end with the onion.
- The butterThe listed 3 tablespoons never appear in the process. Stir them in at the end, off the heat, with the onion; it gives the sauce gloss.
- Double boilerTwenty minutes over simmering water is right for softening crumbs without scorching milk. In a heavy saucepan on the lowest burner setting it will take closer to 10-12 minutes with regular stirring, and it will catch if you wander off.
- Grated onionGrate it on the fine side of a box grater and use the juice as well as the pulp. It goes in at the very end and is only briefly reheated, so it keeps a bite that longer-cooked onion loses.
- YieldSomething over two cups of ingredients cooking down to a cup and a half or so of sauce: enough for six to eight servings alongside boiled or roast beef. It thickens as it stands; loosen with a spoonful of milk when reheating.
Horseradish with beef is one of the older fixed pairings in English and Central European cooking, the root's volatile oils cutting through fat much as mustard does. This version belongs to a distinctly American moment: crumb-thickened sauces were a staple of the turn-of-the-century cooking-school tradition. 52 Sunday Dinners was published in Chicago in the 1910s as a year of complete menus, one per week. The book's format, a fixed dinner for every Sunday, reflects a period when the middle-class Sunday roast was the week's set piece and the housekeeper was expected to plan it rather than improvise.