No. 590

Apple Sauce for Gourmets, Apple Sauce with Horseradish and Orange Juice

Sauce aux Pommes des Gourmets, Sauce aux Pommes au Raifort et jus d'Orange

Gourmets.-Take one pound of peeled apples, remove the seeds and put them in a saucepan with a little water, when cooked, drain and strain through a sieve, reduce and add a little brown sugar, the juice of two oranges and their peels finely cut up and boiled in salted water.

With Horseradish and Orange Juice.-The same preparation as for apple sauce (No. 587), adding the juice of two oranges and six tablespoonfuls of grated fresh horseradish.

← No. 589 Apple Sauce, English Style Cold Sauces No. 591 Swedish Apple Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two variations on a plain apple sauce, one sweetened and perfumed with orange, one sharpened with horseradish. Both are cold sauces meant to sit beside a roast, not desserts.

The cross-referenceThe horseradish version points back to No. 587, an earlier apple sauce in the same series. Presumably that base is close to the method described in the first paragraph -- peeled, cored apples cooked soft in a little water, drained, sieved and reduced -- but what No. 587 actually specifies is not given here.
ApplesA pound of peeled apples is roughly 3 medium fruit, or about 4 before peeling and coring. Use a variety that collapses when cooked, such as Bramley, McIntosh or Golden Delicious; firm supermarket eating apples will resist the sieve.
Drain, then reduceThe draining step matters more than it looks. Sieved apple holds a lot of water, and a sauce that has not been cooked back down will separate on the plate. Reduce over low heat, stirring, until it mounds on a spoon.
The orange peelCut the zest only, in fine julienne, avoiding the white pith, and boil it in salted water until tender. The salted water is a blanching step to draw out bitterness. Drain and rinse before adding, or the sauce will taste saline.
SugarNo quantity is given. Start with a tablespoon of brown sugar per pound of apple and taste; the orange juice already brings sweetness and the sauce should stay tart enough to cut fat.
HorseradishSix tablespoonfuls of freshly grated root makes a fiercely pungent sauce, appropriate to boiled beef; note that the recipe gives no apple weight for this version, since it defers to No. 587, so scale to taste. Grate it fresh and stir it in off the heat and after cooling; heat and time both destroy the volatile compounds that make it sharp. Jarred horseradish is packed in vinegar and will thin the sauce.
Serving and yieldThe gourmets' version makes roughly a cup and a half, enough for six at table. Serve cold or barely cool. Covered in the refrigerator it should keep a few days, though the horseradish will fade fairly quickly.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a complete professional reference, and its cold-sauce chapter runs through a long series of apple sauces distinguished by nationality and garnish: English, Swedish, and one titled "des Gourmets." The underlying idea is old and Northern European: apple as an acid foil to fatty roast meat, particularly pork and goose. What Ranhofer adds is the French kitchen's habit of building families of sauces from one base preparation, so a single sieved apple pur tee becomes several distinct dishes by the addition of orange, or horseradish, or both. The horseradish pairing is generally traced to Central and Northern European practice, where grated root and apple are combined as an accompaniment to boiled beef.