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To Prepare Horse-Radish for Winter
In the fall, mix the quantity wanted in the following proportions: A coffee-cup of grated horse-radish, two table-spoons white sugar, half tea-spoon salt, and a pint and a half cold vinegar; bottle and seal. To make horse-radish sauce, take two table-spoons of the above, add one dessert-spoon olive oil (or melted butter or cream), and one of prepared mustard. - From a Southern housekeeper.
A high-acid preserved condiment that needs almost no adjustment, though the measures are period ones and the timing of the vinegar matters more than the recipe lets on.
- The hinge: when the vinegar goes inGrated horseradish develops its heat within a minute or two of being cut, and vinegar stops that reaction cold. Add the vinegar immediately for a mild condiment; wait two or three minutes for a fierce one. Waiting much longer gives bitterness rather than more heat.
- Coffee-cupIn this period a coffee cup is generally reckoned at about a cup, though the term is loose and some books treat it as nearer 1 1/2 cups. Weigh instead if you can: roughly 4 oz of grated root.
- Dessert-spoonTwo teaspoons, midway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. It appears only in the sauce, so precision is not critical.
- Grating the rootThe volatile oils released are genuinely eye-watering, worse than onion. A food processor with the lid kept on until the fumes settle is the sane modern route; peel the root first and cut out any woody core.
- "Bottle and seal"The vinegar makes this keep, but the color and pungency both fade at room temperature. Refrigerate in a clean jar and expect good flavor for a few months rather than a full winter.
- Prepared mustardPrepared mustard of this period was typically mustard flour worked up with vinegar, so likely sharper and thinner than most modern jarred versions. A plain Dijon is probably the closest match; avoid anything sweetened or whole-grain.
- ServingMade up with cream rather than oil it becomes the standard accompaniment to boiled beef or roast; with mustard alone it stands up to ham and cold tongue.
Horseradish keeps badly as a root once cut and worse once grated, which is why household books of the period commonly give a vinegar method for putting it up in autumn, when the roots are lifted after the first frosts. The chemistry behind the instruction was not understood at the time: grating ruptures the cells and lets an enzyme act on compounds in the root to produce the pungent oil, and acid halts the process, so the habit of dousing the gratings at once was empirical good sense. That the recipe should be credited simply to "a Southern housekeeper" is characteristic of the genre, which assembled contributions from correspondents and traded on regional authority; the sauce itself, thinned with cream or oil and sharpened with mustard, belongs to a much older English tradition of serving grated horseradish with beef.