Home › Catsup, Pickles, Sauces and Salads › Horseradish Sauce
Horseradish Sauce
Put ½ pint of milk or cream in double boiler. Rub together a tablespoon cottolene, lard or butter, and 1 even tablespoon Five Roses flour. Stir into boiling milk, add 1 ounce young horseradish finely grated, 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon sugar. Nice with boiled, fresh or salted meat.
A flour-thickened white sauce with grated horseradish stirred in, meant for the boiled beef and salt pork that anchored a lot of Edwardian Canadian dinners. It comes together in about ten minutes once the root is grated.
- The hinge: keep the heat gentle after the horseradish goes inHorseradish pungency comes from volatile isothiocyanates that cook off quickly. Stir the grated root in at the end, over the water bath only, and never let the sauce boil after that point or you will be left with a bland flour sauce.
- ½ pintIn a Canadian book of this era that is the imperial half-pint, 10 fl oz, or a generous 1¼ cups. An American half-pint of 1 cup also works; the sauce is simply a little thicker.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold as a lard substitute, long discontinued. Use butter, which is the best of the three options listed anyway for a sauce served with meat.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat household flour milled from spring wheat. Ordinary all-purpose flour is a direct substitute here; one level tablespoon to a cup-plus of milk gives a thin pouring sauce rather than a coating one.
- Cook the roux brieflyThe recipe has you rub fat and flour cold and stir the paste into hot milk. That works, but let the thickened milk hold at a bare simmer in the double boiler for four or five minutes to cook out the raw-flour taste before the horseradish goes in.
- One ounce of young horseradishRoughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of finely grated fresh root. "Young" here most likely means a fresh, not-yet-woody root rather than a thick old one. Grate it in a ventilated spot; the fumes are sharp.
- If you use prepared horseradishSubstitute about 2 tablespoons of the bottled grated kind, squeezed dry of its vinegar first, and taste before adding the salt. Bottled horseradish is already salted and acidulated, and the vinegar can curdle a milk sauce if it goes in hot and undrained.
- YieldAbout 1¼ cups, enough for four to six servings alongside boiled beef, corned beef, ham or salt pork.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to buyers of its flour, which explains why the branded flour is named in a sauce that needs only a spoonful of it. Horseradish sauce with boiled beef is a British inheritance carried into Canadian kitchens: the sharp root cuts the fat and blandness of long-simmered meat, and the creamed version here is the milder cousin of plain grated horseradish in vinegar. Horseradish (Armoracia rusticana) is a mustard-family root whose heat exists only after the cells are broken, which is why recipes of this period insist on grating it at the last moment and on "young" roots, dug before they turn fibrous. That the sauce is recommended for "salted meat" is a reminder of how much of the winter larder still came out of a brine barrel when the book was compiled.