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Horse-Radish Sauce (Second Method)
Mix two tablespoonfuls of soft white bread with the same amount of grated horse-radish, cover with two tablespoonfuls of cream and let soak for two hours. Rub through a sieve, add a teaspoonful of sugar, flavor with salt and add enough vinegar to make the sauce the consistency of thick cream. This sauce will keep for several days.
May be varied by adding cracker crumbs and mayonnaise.
A bread-thickened horseradish cream in the older English manner, closer to a bread sauce than to the whipped-cream versions common now. The soaking is the whole technique.
- Soft white breadThis means the crumb of a plain white loaf, torn or crumbled, with no crust — not dried crumbs from a canister, which will drink up the cream and go pasty. Two tablespoonfuls loosely packed is only a small piece of a slice.
- The horseradishFresh root, peeled and grated fine on a rasp, is what the recipe assumes. Prepared horseradish from a jar already contains vinegar and salt, so if you use it, drain it and hold back most of the vinegar at the end.
- Grate it in air, not over the bowlFreshly cut horseradish releases volatile mustard oils that sting the eyes and nose far worse than onion. Grate near an open window and keep your face back.
- The two-hour soak is the hingeThe bread has to soften completely in the cream before sieving, or the sauce stays gritty and separates. Refrigerate it while it soaks rather than leaving it out.
- Rubbing through a sieveUse a fine mesh sieve and the back of a spoon, or a short pulse in a food processor followed by sieving. The aim is a smooth paste, not a purée of the horseradish shreds — some texture should remain.
- Vinegar to consistencyAdd it a teaspoon at a time. Plain white wine or cider vinegar suits it; malt vinegar will dominate. Stop when it mounds slightly on the spoon.
- Keeping"Several days" is optimistic for a cream sauce by modern standards. Covered and refrigerated, use it within two or three days, and expect the horseradish bite to fade noticeably after the first day.
- YieldAbout half a cup — enough for four to six as an accompaniment to cold beef, tongue or ham.
Horseradish thickened with bread and moistened with cream is often said to be among the older English sauces for beef, and it is generally taken to predate the whipped-cream style familiar from mid-twentieth-century menus; bread is traditionally described as a thickener used before flour-based cream sauces became routine in domestic cooking. The pungency comes from sinigrin in the root, which converts to allyl isothiocyanate only when the cells are broken, which is why grated horseradish is fierce and whole root is nearly odourless heir their edge within a day or two.