No. 592

Boar Sauce

Sauce Sanglier

Grate half a pound of fresh horseradish, then lay it in a bowl with four ounces of cranberry jelly (No. 598), adding a spoonful of mustard, the well chopped peel of one lemon and one orange, two ounces of powdered sugar and one tablespoonful of sweet oil, mix all the ingredients well together and serve.

← No. 591 Swedish Apple Sauce Cold Sauces No. 593 Chaudford, Bechamel Cream Sauce, with Tomato →

For the Modern Kitchen

A cold relish-style sauce for game, closer to a cranberry-horseradish condiment than to anything poured from a boat. Almost no cooking is involved, so the whole dish turns on the quality of the horseradish.

Fresh horseradish is the hingeHalf a pound of grated fresh root is a large amount and its heat fades fairly quickly after grating, so grate it last and mix immediately. Jarred prepared horseradish is packed in vinegar and salt; if you substitute it, use somewhat less by weight and taste as you go.
"Sweet oil"Nineteenth-century American cookbooks use this for a bland edible oil, in practice a mild olive oil. Any neutral oil works; a strongly fruity modern extra-virgin will dominate the fruit.
Powdered sugarIn Ranhofer's day this meant sugar ground fine, what we would call caster or superfine. Modern confectioners' sugar carries cornstarch, which will cloud and slightly thicken the sauce. Two ounces is roughly a quarter cup of caster sugar, or nearer half a cup measured as sifted confectioners' sugar.
"A spoonful of mustard"Genuinely ambiguous, and it matters here. Read it as a tablespoon of prepared Dijon-style mustard rather than dry powder, and add it in stages: with this much horseradish already, more mustard buys heat but little flavour.
The cross-referenceNo. 598 is Ranhofer's own cranberry jelly. Four ounces of any firm unsweetened-to-lightly-sweetened cranberry jelly stands in; whole-berry sauce also works but leaves the texture coarse.
Zest, not peelTake only the coloured outer layer of the lemon and orange and chop it very fine. Any white pith will turn the sauce bitter.
Rest before servingDespite the instruction to serve at once, half an hour in the refrigerator lets the sugar dissolve and the citrus soften. Beyond a day the horseradish flattens noticeably.
Yield and useAbout two cups, enough for eight to twelve as a condiment. Serve cold in small quantity beside roast wild boar, venison, pork or cold ham.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894) codified the kitchen of Delmonico's in New York, and its long run of cold sauces exists to serve the game course, then a fixture of formal American menus. Sauce sanglier takes its name from the French for wild boar, whose strong dark meat was traditionally paired with something sharp and sweet at once, the same logic behind Cumberland and poivrade sauces. The cranberry is the American note: where a French kitchen would reach for redcurrant jelly, Ranhofer uses the native berry, and the grated horseradish and citrus peel supply the bite that fat game asks for. That it appears among the cold sauces rather than the hot ones tells you it was passed at table rather than finished in the pan.