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Brittany Sauce
Put into a basin one teaspoonful each of sugar and mustard and one tablespoonful of grated horseradish; mix with one-half teacupful of vinegar. This sauce can be served with either hot or cold meat.
An uncooked table condiment, closer to a horseradish relish than to a sauce in the French sense. Nothing here needs heat, so the whole thing takes two minutes and the only real variables are the strength of the horseradish and the sharpness of the vinegar.
- The teacupfulOlder American books commonly reckon a teacup at somewhere around 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so half a teacupful is roughly 2 to 3 fluid ounces, or 4 to 6 tablespoons — genuinely ambiguous. Start at the lower end and add more vinegar until the mixture is as loose as you want it.
- Mustard means dry mustardMustard probably means dry mustard -- In an ingredient list of this date, a teaspoonful of "mustard" measured off beside the sugar most likely means mustard flour rather than a prepared condiment. Dry English or Colman's-style powder is the safer reading; prepared mustard already contains vinegar and will thin the sauce and dull the horseradish.
- HorseradishFreshly grated root is what is intended, and it is markedly hotter and more volatile than the jarred kind. If you use bottled prepared horseradish, drain it and cut the added vinegar back by about half, since it is already packed in acid.
- Grate with ventilationFresh horseradish releases allyl isothiocyanate the moment it is cut, and it is far more aggressive on the eyes than onion. Grate near an open window or in a food processor with the lid kept on until the fumes settle.
- Which vinegarCider or white wine vinegar suits it; distilled white vinegar at 5 percent is harsh enough to flatten everything else. Malt vinegar works if you want the sauce to lean toward roast beef.
- Rest it brieflyGive it ten to fifteen minutes before serving so the mustard powder hydrates and loses its raw bitterness. Beyond an hour or two the horseradish heat begins to fade, so make it the same day.
- Yield and servingRoughly a third to a half cup depending on how much vinegar you use — enough for four to six people as a dab alongside boiled or roast beef, tongue, ham, or cold cuts. Keep it refrigerated in a closed jar and expect it to be noticeably milder the next day.
The name is a loose one: in classical French kitchen usage sauce bretonne means something quite different, usually an onion-based sauce, white for fish or brown for meat, and it is not a horseradish preparation at all. What Oscar Tschirky gives here belongs instead to the long line of Anglo-American horseradish condiments served with beef, in which grated root, a little sugar, mustard and vinegar stand in for the richer cream-based versions. Horseradish itself is a mustard-family root long grown in northern and central Europe and valued for exactly the pungency that makes it hard to sell as a fresh vegetable; the volatile compounds appear only when the cells are broken, which is why every recipe of this type insists on grating and then dressing with acid.