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Breton Sauce
One tablespoonful of grated horse-radish, a tablespoonful of sugar, a tablespoonful of made mustard and four tablespoonfuls of vinegar. Mix well and serve.
A four-ingredient uncooked condiment, closer to a dressing than a sauce. The only real work is understanding what the old terms mean and getting the sweet-sharp balance right for your own horseradish.
- "Made mustard"This means mustard already mixed into a paste, as opposed to dry mustard powder. Any smooth prepared mustard works.
- Grated horse-radishThe original assumes a fresh root grated at the moment of use, which is far hotter and more volatile than the jarred kind. If using bottled prepared horseradish, drain it well and expect to add a little more, since it is already diluted with vinegar and often cream.
- Which vinegarUnspecified, as was usual. Malt or cider vinegar suits the sweet-and-hot profile; wine vinegar gives a lighter, sharper sauce. Avoid anything as strong as pickling vinegar at this ratio.
- SugarA tablespoon in so small a quantity reads as very sweet to modern palates. Start with half and adjust, tasting against the meat rather than on its own.
- Let it standMixed and served immediately, the horseradish heat sits on top and the vinegar tastes raw. Twenty minutes in the refrigerator lets the four elements settle into one another.
- Yield and keepingAbout seven tablespoons, a scant half cup, which serves four to six alongside cold beef, tongue or ham. Covered and refrigerated it keeps a few days, though the horseradish loses its bite steadily.
Cold-meat sauces occupy their own chapter in domestic cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for a straightforward reason: the Sunday joint was expected to reappear cold on Monday and Tuesday, and a sharp condiment was what made the second and third appearances tolerable. Horseradish with beef is a long-standing northern European pairing, and the sweet-sour-hot combination here is essentially a horseradish cream with the cream left out and vinegar doing the work. The Breton name seems decorative rather than descriptive; cookbooks of the era are often said to have attached regional French labels loosely to simple sauces, and while a sauce bretonne does exist in classical French cookery, it bears no resemblance to this mixture.