No. 605

Horseradish and Cream Sauce, and with Oil

Sauce Raifort a la Creme, et a l'Huile

Put into a bowl a quarter of a pound of grated horseradish with an equal quantity of fresh bread-crumbs, a little sugar, some salt, the juice of two lemons, a tablespoonful of vinegar and a little white stock (No. 422), also adding a pint of cream. This sauce is used with cold meats.

With Oil.-Cut some slices of lemon after suppressing the yellow and white rind; put them into a vessel with oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, some chopped parsley, tarragon, grated horseradish and a little ground pepper; mix all well together. Broiled fish may be served with this sauce.

← No. 604 Green Spanish Sauce Cold Sauces No. 606 Mayonnaise Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

Two cold horseradish sauces from Ranhofer's kitchen at Delmonico's: one enriched with cream and thickened with bread, the other a loose vinaigrette. Both are assembled, not cooked, so the quality of the horseradish decides everything.

Grate the root yourselfRanhofer assumes fresh horseradish root, peeled and grated fine. Bottled prepared horseradish is already acidulated and will throw the lemon and vinegar out of balance; if you use it, drain it well and cut the vinegar back to a teaspoon. Grated root loses its heat within an hour or two of exposure to air, so make the sauce close to serving.
Quantities and yieldA quarter pound of grated horseradish is roughly a cup loosely packed. Ranhofer's "an equal quantity" of crumbs is ambiguous: taken by weight it would be several cups of soft crumbs, so matching by volume is an editorial choice rather than what the text states. Read that way, with a pint (2 cups) of cream it makes about a quart of sauce, enough for a large cold buffet. Halve or quarter it for a household table.
The cream"Cream" here is most likely a rich, heavy cream, and nothing in the recipe suggests it is whipped; it goes in liquid. The bread-crumbs do the thickening: give the sauce ten minutes to stand so they swell, then judge the consistency, since crumb absorbency varies wildly.
Fresh bread-crumbsThese are soft crumbs from the interior of a day-old loaf, torn or rubbed by hand, not dried and toasted crumbs. Packaged dry crumbs will drink the cream and go pasty.
White stock, No. 422Ranhofer's white stock is an unbrowned, clear broth, typically veal and/or poultry. A light unsalted chicken stock stands in perfectly. "A little" is presumably no more than a few tablespoons, used only to loosen the mixture.
"Suppressing the yellow and white rind"For the oil version, this means cutting the peel and all the bitter white pith off the lemon before slicing, so only the flesh goes in. Cutting the slices into small segments makes the sauce easier to spoon over fish.
Proportions for the oil sauceNo amounts are given at all. Build it as a vinaigrette, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, with a tablespoon each of chopped parsley and tarragon and two tablespoons of grated horseradish per half cup of oil. Use a mild olive or a neutral oil; a peppery oil fights the root.
ServingThe cream sauce belongs with cold roast beef, boiled beef, tongue or ham. The oil sauce is meant for broiled fish and is best spooned over while the fish is still warm, so the horseradish releases its aroma.

A Little History

Horseradish with cream and bread-crumbs is an old northern European pairing, long associated with the boiled beef of Austria and Germany, where a bread-thickened horseradish sauce is still standard; Charles Ranhofer, who cooked at Delmonico's in New York and published The Epicurean in 1894, gives it French dress as sauce raifort a la creme. The bread-crumbs are the tell of an older technique: before cooks reached for reduced cream or emulsified yolks, soft crumbs were often used to give body to cold sauces, a habit that is generally traced back through bread sauce and medieval breadcrumb-thickened cameline and similar preparations. Placing both versions in the cold sauces chapter reflects the organisation of a large nineteenth-century restaurant, where the garde manger station was responsible for assembled, uncooked sauces served alongside cold joints and broiled fish.