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Whipped Cream Horseradish Sauce
Fifth Sunday 4 tablespoons freshly grated Few grains cayenne. horseradish.
Few drops onion juice. 1 1/2 tablespoons vinegar. 1/4 cup heavy cream whipped. 1/4 teaspoon salt.
PROCESS: Mix the first five ingredients thoroughly, then fold in the whipped cream. Chill and serve.
A cold horseradish cream of the plainest kind, from a 1913 menu book that paired it with boiled or roast beef. The ingredient list has been scrambled by the original two-column printing, so read it carefully before you start.
- The list of fiveThe five items to mix are horseradish, cayenne, onion juice, vinegar and salt; the whipped cream is folded in last. The vinegar measure of 1 1/2 tablespoons matches the printed page. If you prefer a milder sauce, add it in stages and taste as you go.
- Freshly grated horseradishThe recipe means a peeled root grated on the fine side of a box grater, which is far hotter and more volatile than the jarred kind. Prepared horseradish is already packed in vinegar, so if you substitute it, drain it well and cut the added vinegar back accordingly.
- Grate with ventilationRoot horseradish releases allyl isothiocyanate when cut, and the fumes are sharper than onion. Grate near an open window or a running fan; freshly grated root loses its bite fairly quickly unless acid is added, so make the sauce shortly before serving.
- Onion juiceA standard period ingredient: half an onion pressed against a grater or squeezed in a cloth, yielding juice without pulp. A few drops is right; more turns the cream sulfurous as it sits.
- Folding the creamWhip to soft peaks only. Over-stiff cream is more likely to go grainy and to weep in the bowl once the vinegary horseradish mixture is folded through.
- Chilling timeAn hour in the refrigerator is plenty. Left overnight, the cream slumps and separates from the vinegar, and the horseradish loses most of its bite.
- YieldRoughly two-thirds of a cup, enough for four to six people alongside cold roast beef, boiled beef, smoked trout or beets.
Horseradish beaten into cream is a long-established accompaniment to beef in northern European cooking, and English and German kitchens both claim versions of it well before the nineteenth century. Its appeal is structural rather than sentimental: cream buffers the pungency of the grated root, so a sauce that would be punishing on its own becomes something you can spoon freely over a slice of meat. The whipped rather than merely stirred version belongs to the era of this book, when domestic-science writers are often said to have been fond of folding whipped cream into dishes from horseradish to mayonnaise to gelatine desserts. Its appearance in a Sunday-dinner planner is a clue to the menu it served: a Sunday roast or a cold joint, dressed up with almost no work and no heat in the kitchen.