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Sauce for Relishing Beef Hot or Cold
Put two tea-spoonfuls of prepared mustard into a large cup, and mix with it a tea-spoonful of powdered sugar, a salt-spoonful of salt, and five table-spoonfuls of good vinegar. Stir this preparation briskly for two or three minutes with a wooden or silver fork, then pour it into a tureen in which has been placed a stick of horse-radish finely grated; stir the mixture again, and serve. Probable cost of horse-radish, 2d. per stick. Sufficient for five or six persons.
An uncooked table sauce, closer to a loose horseradish dressing than anything that needs a pan. The only real technique is grating the root at the last moment.
- Grate the horseradish lastHorseradish releases its heat only when the cells are broken, and that pungency starts fading within about half an hour. Grate it directly into the tureen just before serving rather than in advance.
- A stick of horse-radishA section of root, perhaps 3-4 inches long and thumb-thick; grated, that will give a few tablespoons, but the recipe leaves the quantity to the cook. Fresh root turns up in greengrocers and some supermarkets in winter; drained bottled grated horseradish works, but use it slightly generously and cut the vinegar back by a spoonful since it is already packed in acid.
- Salt-spoonfulUsually read as about a quarter teaspoon, though salt-spoons varied and no fixed measure existed.
- Prepared mustardIn a Victorian English book this most likely means mustard mixed from powder with water rather than a coarse or sweetened condiment. English mustard from a jar is the closest match; anything milder will disappear behind the vinegar.
- Wooden or silver forkThe instruction is not decorative. Ordinary steel and iron of the period reacted with vinegar and mustard and gave a metallic taste. Modern stainless is fine.
- VinegarFive tablespoons is a lot of acid for two teaspoons of mustard, which is the point: this is meant to be sharp against cold roast beef. A plain malt or cider vinegar suits it; add the last spoonful to taste rather than all at once.
- Yield and servingMakes roughly half a cup, enough for five or six as the original says. It does not emulsify or thicken, so stir again at the table. Best eaten the day it is made.
Horseradish with beef is a long-standing English pairing, recorded in seventeenth-century sources and well established by the eighteenth century, when the grated root was served either dry, in vinegar, or worked into cream. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households in the later nineteenth century, gives a costing of tuppence for the root, which tells you the book expected readers to weigh a sauce against its price. The recipe's usefulness with cold beef is of its time, since a large Sunday joint was meant to reappear at several later meals and a bracing relish was what made the third appearance bearable.