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Radishes, in White Sauce
Take a bunch of radishes, scrape them, cut them in rather thick slices, and boil in salted water until tender; strain the water off, and have ready half a pint of nicely made and well seasoned white sauce, into which put the radishes; make thoroughly hot again. Cut two or three well coloured and cooked carrots into nice shapes or round slices; pile the radishes on a hot dish, and garnish with the carrots and chopped parsley. This may be served as a vegetable entree, or as an adjunct to roast beef.
A short Victorian side dish that treats the radish as a cooked root rather than a salad garnish. Cooking mellows the pepper almost entirely, so the seasoning of the sauce is doing most of the work.
- Don't overboilSliced radishes are tender in roughly 5-8 minutes in salted water, less if the slices are thin. Pushed further they collapse into a watery mush and the pink bleeds out; test with a knife tip early.
- Half a pint of sauceCassell's uses the Imperial pint of 20 fluid ounces, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. That is generous for one bunch of radishes; a cup is usually enough to coat them.
- "Nicely made white sauce"A milk-based white sauce (period versions are also built on veal or other pale stock): about 1½ tablespoons each butter and flour cooked to a blond roux, then the liquid whisked in and simmered until it no longer tastes of raw flour. Season assertively with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg, since the boiled radishes contribute little of their own.
- Drain thoroughlyRadishes hold a surprising amount of water. Let them sit in the strainer a minute or shake them dry before they go into the sauce, or the sauce thins on the plate.
- Reheating"Make thoroughly hot again" means gently — a bare simmer, stirred. A hard boil after the vegetables go in will cook the radishes further and thin the sauce as they shed water.
- The carrot garnish"Well coloured" carrots means deep orange ones, cooked separately and cut into rounds or shaped with a small cutter. The point is contrast against the pale sauce; nothing is gained by cooking them with the radishes.
- YieldOne bunch of radishes serves two as a side, three at a stretch. Scale up by the bunch and increase the sauce proportionally.
- Vegetable entréeIn this period an entrée was a made dish served among others within a course, not the main course in the modern sense. Presented on its own hot dish it stands as such a dish; alongside roast beef it is simply a vegetable.
Cooked radishes look eccentric now, but they do turn up in nineteenth-century British and French cookery, where the radish could be handled as one of the minor roots alongside turnip and salsify — though it remained far commoner raw, as a salad vegetable. The turn from sharp pepper to mildness on cooking comes from the radish's mustard-oil compounds, which are volatile and largely lost to heat, and that is a plausible reason the recipe insists the sauce be "well seasoned". Radish, horseradish and mustard are all relatives, and horseradish and mustard have a long association with English beef.