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Horse-Radish, Pickling
Scrape the outer skin off the horse-radish, and cut it into inch lengths. Put these into earthen jars, cover with cold vinegar, and cork securely. Wax the corks, and keep the pickle in a cool dry place. Time, a few minutes to prepare. Probable cost of horse-radish, 2d. per root.
A cold-pack pickle with three ingredients and no cooking at all, which makes the details of vessel, vinegar and storage the whole recipe.
- Vinegar strength is the thing that mattersThe pickle keeps only because the vinegar is acidic enough to stop spoilage, and nothing here is heated. Use a vinegar labelled 5 per cent acidity, cover the root completely, and top up if any pieces rise above the surface.
- Treat it as a refrigerator pickleBecause the jars are neither processed nor sealed under heat, this is not shelf-stable by current standards. Keep it in the refrigerator and use it within two or three months rather than storing it in a larder for the year.
- Earthen jars, corks and waxThe wax-sealed cork was the Victorian answer to an airtight closure. A glass jar with a plastic or plastic-lined screw lid does the job better; avoid bare metal lids, which vinegar corrodes, and avoid old unglazed or unknown glazed earthenware.
- Cutting versus gratingThe recipe stores the root in inch lengths rather than grated. Grated horseradish left unacidified loses its bite within hours, while vinegar added at once fixes the heat at a milder level, so keeping batons and grating a piece as needed is a plausible reason for the whole-piece pack.
- Work in airThe pungency is allyl isothiocyanate, released only when the cells are broken. Peeling and cutting is mild enough, but if you grate the root, do it near an open window or with the food processor lid closed until the fumes settle.
- Scraping the skin"Scrape the outer skin off" means take only the thin brown rind; the flesh just beneath it is the sharpest part of the root. Trim any woody core from the crown end and discard soft or greenish patches.
- Quantity and yieldThe recipe gives none. A large root of roughly 8 oz, cut into lengths and covered with vinegar, needs a jar of a pint or so; that is a considerable amount of grated horseradish.
- Expect it to fadeEven cold and covered, the pieces will dull from cream to grey-buff and lose bite over time. Cool and dark slows this; light and warmth hasten it.
Horseradish (Armoracia rusticana) is a brassica root grown in Britain since at least the sixteenth century, and by the Victorian period it was so firmly attached to roast beef that Cassell's can quote a price of tuppence a root without further comment — it was a cheap, hardy, almost weedy thing, since a fragment of root left in the ground returns indefinitely. The interest of this entry is preservation rather than flavour: grated horseradish loses its heat within hours unless acidified, and before refrigeration a vinegar pack in a sealed jar was one way among several — roots could also be stored in sand or a cellar, or left in the ground and dug as wanted — of keeping the pungency to hand. The wax poured over the cork is the same technique used for fruit preserves and homemade wines throughout the period, an attempt at an airtight seal in an era before the screw-band lid was universal in domestic kitchens.