Home › Menu III › Horse-Radish Sauce
Horse-Radish Sauce
Take two tablespoonfuls of soft white bread crumbs and the same amount of grated horseradish, cover with cream and let soak for two hours. Rub through a sieve, add two tablespoonfuls of sugar, pepper and salt to taste. When served it should be of the consistency of thick cream: stiff enough not to run; as this sauce will keep for several days in a cool place, you can multiply the quantities and serve at other times.
A cold, uncooked sauce built on soaked bread rather than whipped cream, which makes it firmer and more stable than the whipped versions common today. Two things need attention: the cream quantity is never stated, and the sugar is heavier than most modern palates expect.
- The cream is unmeasured"Cover with cream" over 2 tablespoons of crumbs and 2 of horseradish means roughly 4 to 6 tablespoons of heavy cream, but you are working to a texture, not a number. Add enough to soak the crumbs through, then adjust at the end until it holds a spoon-line without running.
- Fresh horseradish, not the jarGrated horseradish here means a fresh root, peeled and grated on a fine rasp. Bottled prepared horseradish is already packed in vinegar and salt, so if you substitute it, drain it well and hold back the salt until you have tasted.
- Grate it in air, not over the bowlFresh horseradish releases volatile isothiocyanates the moment it is cut, and they are genuinely eye-watering at close range. Grate at arm's length or in a food processor with the lid on, and use it quickly, as the heat fades within an hour or two of grating.
- The sugar is highTwo tablespoons of sugar to two of horseradish gives a distinctly sweet sauce, in the older English style meant to cut cold roast beef. A teaspoon or two is closer to modern taste; add it gradually and stop when the burn is rounded rather than buried.
- The sieve stepRubbing through a sieve was the period way to get a smooth, uniform body from soaked bread. A short pulse in a small food processor does the same work, though the sieve still catches any coarse shreds of root and gives a finer finish.
- Soft white bread crumbsThese are fresh crumbs from the inside of a soft loaf, not dried or toasted crumbs from a canister. Dry crumbs absorb far more liquid and turn the sauce pasty.
- "A cool place" means the refrigeratorWritten for a larder or cellar. Covered and chilled, the sauce is good for three or four days, though the horseradish loses its bite steadily after the first day and the sauce will want a little fresh grated root stirred in to revive it.
- Yield and servingAs written it makes roughly half to two-thirds of a cup, enough for four. It belongs with cold or hot roast beef, boiled beef, smoked trout or ham, and is served cold.
Horseradish arrived at the English table as a condiment for beef by the seventeenth century, and the pairing had hardened into orthodoxy long before this book was printed; John Gerard's herbal of 1597 already notes that Germans ate the grated root with fish and meat where the English were still using it chiefly as medicine. The bread-crumb method here is the older technique, related to bread sauce and to the medieval habit of thickening sauces with crumb rather than flour or egg; whipped-cream horseradish is the later and lighter descendant. A sauce that keeps several days in the larder could be made once and carried across a week of cold cuts, which is precisely the economy the last sentence recommends.