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Horseradish Sauce
6 tablespoonfuls grated horseradish 1 egg yolk 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 tablespoonful vinegar 1 gill (1/2 cup) whipping cream Mix the horseradish, yolk of egg, and salt together, then add the vinegar and fold in the whipped cream.
If the horseradish is already in vinegar, omit the tablespoonful of vinegar and press the horseradish until dry.
A cold horseradish cream of the type served with boiled beef, thickened and enriched with a raw egg yolk that never sees heat. That yolk is the problem.
- Raw yolk, no cooking stepThe yolk is stirred in and the sauce is served cold. Nothing in the method brings the egg anywhere near the 71C/160F at which Salmonella is reliably killed, and the sauce is typically spooned over meat at the table rather than heated with it.
- The vinegar does not make it safeOne tablespoonful of vinegar against six of horseradish, a yolk and half a cup of cream is very unlikely to bring the mixture down to the pH at which acid would reliably inhibit pathogens. Acidity here is a seasoning, not a control.
- Held cold, served slowlyA sauce boat sitting out through a meal is exactly the warm-holding condition that lets any contamination multiply. If you want horseradish cream, use a current recipe.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the original helpfully glosses it: 4 fl oz, about 120 ml, whipped.
- Grated horseradishThe recipe assumes a fresh root grated at home. Jarred horseradish is packed in vinegar, which is why the author tells you to press it dry and drop the added tablespoonful.
- YieldThe half cup of cream roughly doubles when whipped, so with the horseradish the finished sauce comes to appreciably more than a cup.
Horseradish with beef is a long-standing northern European pairing, and the cream-lightened version, sharp root folded into whipped cream, appears in English and American cookery of the later nineteenth century. The raw yolk here does the work of an emulsifier and a thickener, and reflects a period when the risks of eating eggs uncooked were far less discussed than they are now.