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BRETONNE SAUCE (for cold or hot Beef)
Mix a wine-glassful of vinegar with equal quantities of pounded sugar and custard, a tea-spoonful of each, and about a table-spoonful of grated horse-radish. When pickles are preferred, this mixture will be found very agreeable; it combines the flavour of a sauce and pickle. Probable cost, 4d.
A cold, uncooked condiment of the sharp Victorian type, meant to sit beside a joint of beef rather than be poured over it. It comes together in a minute, but two of the words need translating before you start.
- "Custard" is almost certainly mustard"Custard" is very likely mustard -- A teaspoon of custard among vinegar and horseradish makes little sense as a beef sauce, and mustard is a common partner in Victorian sauces of this kind. Read it as a teaspoon of made English mustard, or of mustard powder if you want more bite. The word as printed may be a compositor's slip or a variant reading; we leave it in the original untouched.
- A wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books this is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, roughly a quarter cup. It is a large proportion of vinegar against two teaspoons of sugar and mustard plus a tablespoon of horseradish, so the result is a thin, pungent dressing rather than a creamy sauce.
- Pounded sugarSugar crushed fine in a mortar, sold in loaves before granulated sugar was standard. Use caster sugar, which dissolves in cold vinegar without grittiness.
- The vinegar decides everythingThe recipe does not say which vinegar to use. Malt vinegar gives a brown, sharp result; cider or white wine vinegar makes it noticeably milder. Taste and adjust the sugar to your vinegar rather than trusting the single teaspoon.
- Grated horseradishFresh root, grated on the fine side of a box grater, is what is meant. Jarred horseradish already contains vinegar and often cream, so cut the vinegar back and the sugar too if you substitute it. Bottled creamed horseradish will give a different sauce altogether.
- Let it standMix, then leave it fifteen to twenty minutes so the sugar dissolves and the horseradish heat blooms into the vinegar. It keeps a few days covered in the refrigerator, though the horseradish fades fast once grated.
- YieldAbout a third of a cup, enough for four to six servings of cold beef. Scale up freely; nothing here is temperamental.
In classical French cookery u00e0 la bretonne normally means something else entirely u2014 a brown or white sauce built on softened onions, sometimes with white wine and tomato, named for Brittany. What Cassell's gives here is an English cold-beef relish that has borrowed the label, and it belongs to a whole family of Victorian sideboard sauces: vinegar, sugar, mustard and horseradish, mixed raw and served with the remains of a joint. The note that it will suit those who "prefer pickles" is the point of it u2014 in a period when cold sliced beef was a standing fixture of luncheon and supper tables, the household needed a bottled or bowl-made sharpener always ready. The "probable cost, 4d" attached to recipe entries is characteristic of Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for middle-class households and issued in parts in the mid-to-late 1870s, then reissued for decades afterwards.