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Sauce Prague
1 cup fresh bread crumbs 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup beef broth 4 tablespoons grated horse-radish 4 tablespoons shortening Add the bread crumbs and salt to the beef broth, cook for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Rub through a puree strainer. Add the horse-radish and shortening, 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 central European type, closer to a panade than to a modern cream sauce. It comes together in about fifteen minutes and depends entirely on the horseradish going in off the heat.
- The hinge: no boiling after the horseradishHorseradish owes its heat to volatile mustard oils that drive off quickly once the sauce simmers. Add it with the pan off direct heat and hold the sauce below a simmer from then on, or you will be left with a bland bread puree.
- Grated horse-radishThe original assumes a fresh root grated at the moment of use. Prepared horseradish from a jar is packed in vinegar and is milder, so taste as you go; if you use fresh root, grate it in a well-ventilated spot and keep your face back from the bowl.
- Shortening means fat, not vegetable shorteningIn books of this vintage "shortening" is a generic term for the cooking fat on hand. Butter is the sympathetic choice here, 4 tablespoons being half a stick, and it enriches the sauce in a way that hydrogenated shortening will not.
- Fresh bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn from a day-old white loaf, not the dry sandy crumbs sold for coating. Dry crumbs absorb far more liquid and will give you paste rather than sauce.
- Puree strainerA conical sieve or food mill with the back of a ladle does the job. A blender is faster but will make the sauce gluey if run long, so pulse briefly if you go that route.
- ConsistencyAfter ten minutes the crumbs will have drunk most of the half cup of broth. Loosen with additional warm broth until it falls thickly from a spoon; the amount depends on how dry your bread was.
- YieldRoughly a cup by the look of the proportions, enough for perhaps four to six servings as an accompaniment. It is best made shortly before serving, since the pungency fades on standing and it thickens as it cools.
Grated horseradish with beef is a fixture of Bohemian and Austrian cooking, where boiled beef served with a horseradish sauce is standard table fare, and thickening such a sauce with soft bread crumbs rather than flour appears to be the older of the two techniques. The name here points to Prague, though the dish is really a family of regional sauces rather than one recipe with an author, and versions bound with cream instead of broth are also found under the same general heading. Its placement alongside steak, cold boiled beef and roast veal shows it was understood as a workhorse rather than a novelty.