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HORSE-RADISH SAUCE, BROWN (for Boiled Meat or Fish)
Grate two table-spoonfuls of horse-radish, put it into a stewpan with half a pint of good brown gravy, and let it stand by the side of the fire until quite hot. Add a tea-spoonful of mixed mustard, a clove of garlic pounded with a little butter, and a dessert-spoonful of vinegar. If it is wished to have the sauce very mild, use equal parts of bread-crumbs and the scraped root. Serve in a tureen. Time, twenty minutes. Probable cost, 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A simple warmed sauce rather than a cooked one, and the difference matters: heat is used only to bring the ingredients together.
- Never let it boilThe volatile compounds that give horseradish its heat break down quickly above a simmer. "By the side of the fire" means the cool edge of the range — hold it below a simmer and it will stay sharp; boil it and you are left with a much duller brown gravy.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1 1/4 US cups. Cassell's is a British book throughout, so read all its pints and gills on the imperial scale.
- Spoon sizesA Victorian dessert-spoonful is roughly 2 teaspoons; a tablespoonful is close to the modern one. Two tablespoons of grated root in 10 fl oz of gravy is a restrained amount — taste and add more if your horseradish is not fresh.
- Mixed mustardThis means mustard powder already made up with water into a paste — English mustard, in other words. A teaspoon of Dijon works, though it is milder and more acidic.
- Good brown gravyThe recipe asks only for "good" brown gravy, meaning something with body rather than a thin pan juice. A well-reduced beef stock thickened lightly with a brown roux gives the right consistency; commercial gravy granules will be too salty once the mustard and vinegar go in.
- Fresh root, and fumesGrate horseradish just before use, as it loses pungency quickly once grated, and jarred grated horseradish is already packed in vinegar, so reduce or omit the dessert-spoonful. Grating a fresh root releases irritant vapours; work at arm's length or in a food processor with the lid on.
- The mild versionSubstituting half the horseradish with fresh breadcrumbs also thickens the sauce noticeably. If you take that route, expect a texture closer to bread sauce and thin with a little extra gravy.
- Timing and yieldThe twenty minutes is standing time at low heat, not active cooking. It serves four or five as written, and it will not hold well — reheating drives off what is left of the pungency.
Horseradish reached English tables as a condiment relatively late; it was long treated as a medicinal root, and its use as a relish for beef is generally traced to the seventeenth century, by which time John Evelyn and others were noting it among the sharp roots eaten with meat. The familiar creamed version is the one that survived, but Victorian kitchens kept a whole family of horseradish sauces — white ones bound with cream for roast beef, and brown ones like this, built on the day's gravy, for boiled beef, boiled fish and salt meats. That the recipe suggests bulking the root out with breadcrumbs is a reminder of how much stronger a freshly dug root can be than the jarred product most cooks now buy, and the note on probable cost, sixpence, places it in Cassell's characteristic habit of costing every dish for the mistress of a middle-class household running to a budget.