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Horse-Radish Sauce, with Eggs
Boil two eggs hard. When cold, pound the yolks with the back of a wooden spoon, and add very gradually three or four table-spoonfuls of vinegar, sufficient to make a smooth cream. Add three dessert-spoonfuls of grated horse-radish and half a tea-spoonfuls of grated horse-radish and half a tea-spoonful of salt. Serve in a tureen. Time, ten minutes to boil the eggs. Probable cost, 3d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A cold, sharp sauce built on hard-boiled yolks rather than cream or oil — closer to a rough egg vinaigrette than to the whipped horse-radish cream most cooks know. Note that the original text stutters: the phrase "grated horse-radish and half a tea-spoonfuls of" is repeated by a typesetter's error, so there is one quantity of horse-radish, not two.
- The hinge: add the vinegar drop by dropThe yolks will only take up the vinegar as a smooth cream if it goes in very gradually, exactly as for a mayonnaise. Tip it in at once and you get grainy yolk floating in sour liquid.
- Dessert-spoonfulA dessert-spoon is usually reckoned at about two teaspoons, so three dessert-spoonfuls is roughly two tablespoons of grated horse-radish. Victorian spoon measures were not standardised, so the three or four tablespoons of vinegar may have been somewhat larger than the modern spoon of that name; add it gradually and stop when the yolks form a cream.
- Horse-radishFresh root, peeled and grated on a fine rasp, is what is meant. Jarred grated horse-radish already carries vinegar and salt, so if you use it, hold back some of both and taste as you go. Prepared "horseradish sauce" in a jar is creamed and will not work here.
- VinegarA plain white wine or cider vinegar suits it; malt vinegar is period-appropriate but will dominate. Modern vinegars are standardised at around 5 per cent acidity, whereas the strength of vinegar drawn from a cask varied, so judge sharpness by taste.
- Boiling the eggsTen minutes gives the firm, dry, crumbly yolk this sauce needs — for once the old timing is right, because a soft yolk will not pound to a paste.
- The whitesThe recipe uses only the yolks. Chop the whites finely and fold them in if you want texture, or keep them for a salad; nothing in the method forbids it.
- ServingEnough for two or three as written, and it is a sauce for cold or hot roast beef, boiled beef, or oily fish such as mackerel and trout. Make it within a few hours of serving: grated horse-radish loses its pungency fast once cut, and the sauce is not intended to keep.
Cassell's ran several horse-radish sauces side by side — hot ones thickened with butter and flour, cold ones bound with cream — and this yolk-and-vinegar version belongs to the older, thriftier family, where a hard yolk thickened the vinegar in place of expensive cream or oil. The "probable cost, 3d." is the point of the entry as much as the flavour is: Cassell's priced almost everything. Horse-radish itself, a mustard-family root long grown in British gardens, had been the standard accompaniment to roast beef since at least the eighteenth century. Serving the sauce "in a tureen" reflects the practice of sending sauces to table separately rather than dressing the meat in the kitchen.