No. 578

Horseradish Butter

Beurre de Raifort

Pound four ounces of scraped horseradish with eight ounces of butter, some salt and red pepper; then rub it through a sieve. If this butter be needed to add to a sauce, only put it in at the last moment. Horseradish should not be allowed to boil; neither should it be prepared too long in advance.

← No. 577 Butter with Green Gooseberries Hot & Cold Butters No. 579 Kneaded Butter →

For the Modern Kitchen

A compound butter from Ranhofer's The Epicurean, meant as a finishing element rather than a spread. The whole point is freshness: horseradish loses its bite fast and turns bitter with heat.

The hingeNever let the butter boil once it goes into a sauce. Allyl isothiocyanate, the compound that gives horseradish its heat, is volatile and breaks down quickly with heat, leaving only a dull, faintly bitter vegetal note. Whisk it into the sauce off the heat and serve.
ProportionsFour ounces horseradish to eight ounces butter is a 1:2 ratio by weight — about 1 cup of finely grated root to 2 sticks of butter. This is assertive; halve the horseradish if you want something closer to a table butter.
"Scraped" horseradishRanhofer means the fresh root, peeled and scraped or grated to a pulp. Jarred prepared horseradish is packed in vinegar and salt and will slacken the butter and shift the flavor; if you use it, drain it hard and cut the added salt.
Red pepperIn this book that means cayenne, not paprika and not sweet pepper. A generous pinch is enough — it should sharpen the horseradish rather than register as chile.
Pounding and sievingA mortar and a drum sieve were the original tools. A food processor does the work in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, and finish by pressing the butter through a fine sieve if you want the smooth texture Ranhofer expects.
TimingMake it the day you use it. Grated horseradish begins losing pungency within hours of being cut, and the butter is likely to be noticeably duller after a day or so, even refrigerated.
VentilationFreshly grating a whole root releases enough mustard oil vapor to sting the eyes badly. Grate at arm's length, or in a covered processor bowl that you let stand a moment before opening.
Yield and useAbout 12 ounces, enough for a dozen or more servings. Traditional partners are boiled beef, roast beef, smoked fish and grilled steak; a coin of it on hot meat, or a spoonful stirred into a finished velouté or brown sauce.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete professional system, and its long run of beurres composés — hot and cold compound butters — reflects how a nineteenth-century brigade actually worked: a shelf of flavored butters let a cook finish a sauce or dress a grilled cut to order in seconds. Horseradish itself is a much older northern European fixture, a Brassica relative long paired with boiled beef in Germany and Austria and with roast beef in England, and its heat comes from the same class of mustard oils found in mustard seed and wasabi, released only when the root's cells are broken. Ranhofer's warning against boiling is the practical knowledge of a kitchen that served horseradish constantly: the volatile compounds that make it worth using are gone the moment the sauce simmers, which is why the butter is a finishing touch and not an ingredient.