Home › Shell Fish › Bohemian Sauce
Bohemian Sauce
1 cup fresh bread crumbs 1/2 cup beef broth 4 tablespoons grated horseradish 4 tablespoons butter 1/4 teaspoon salt Add the bread crumbs and seasoning to the beef broth, cook for ten minutes, stirring occasionally. Rub through a puree strainer. Add the horseradish and butter, a little at a time, mix well but do not boil. Serve with beef steak or cold boiled beef or roast veal.
A bread-thickened horseradish sauce of the old panada type — no flour, no roux, just crumbs swollen in broth and pushed through a sieve. It comes together in fifteen minutes and lives or dies on how you treat the horseradish.
- Never let it boilThe pungency of horseradish comes from volatile isothiocyanates that cook off fast. Add the grated root only after the crumb base is off direct heat, warm it through gently, and serve. A boiled version tastes flatly of cabbage.
- Fresh grated horseradishGrated horseradish -- Four tablespoons is a lot, and freshly grated root is far sharper than the jarred prepared kind. If using bottled horseradish, drain it well and start with about half the amount, then taste — the vinegar in it will also thin and sour the sauce.
- Bread crumbs"Fresh" here means soft crumbs torn from the interior of a day-old loaf, not dry packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid. With dry crumbs use roughly half the quantity or add extra broth.
- The strainerA puree strainer is a conical or bowl-shaped fine sieve; press the cooked crumbs through with the back of a ladle. A stick blender does the same job in seconds and gives a smoother result, though the texture will be slightly gluier.
- Butter, a little at a timeThe butter is mounted in at the end, as in a monter au beurre finish. Keep the base warm but well below a simmer, whisk in cold butter in pieces, and it should stay glossy; too hot and it can break into an oily film.
- Broth strengthHalf a cup of beef broth carries all the savour, so use something well reduced or a good stock rather than a weak cube. The quarter teaspoon of salt may assume an unsalted broth — taste before adding it.
- Yield and holdingMakes roughly a cup, enough for about four servings. A butter-finished sauce of this kind is best made while the meat rests and held only briefly in a warm bowl.
Horseradish with beef is one of the oldest surviving central and northern European pairings, and sauces built on soaked bread rather than flour are older still — the medieval and early modern kitchen thickened with crumbs, almonds or egg long before roux became standard. The name here simply signals Bohemia, the Czech lands, where grated horseradish (křen) is a fixture alongside boiled beef and smoked meats; "Bohemian" is often said to have been used loosely in American cookbooks for anything with an Austro-Hungarian accent, much as "Spanish" was used for anything with tomato and pepper. The recipe itself directs you to beef, veal, or cold boiled beef.