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Horse-Radish Sauce (Two teaspoons of made mustard)
Two teaspoons of made mustard, two of white sugar half a teaspoon of salt, and a gill of vinegar; mix and pour over grated horse-radish. Excellent with beef.
A cold, uncooked sauce of the kind that once stood on every beef platter. The original assumes you know how much horseradish you are grating, so the balance is yours to set.
- A gill4 fl oz, half a US cup; the imperial gill used in Britain and Canada is 5 fl oz, and either will serve here. Cider or plain white wine vinegar suits beef; distilled white vinegar is sharper and will need the sugar.
- "Made mustard"Prepared wet mustard from a jar, not dry powder. If you only have powder, mix a scant teaspoon with cold water and let it stand ten minutes before using.
- The missing quantityNo amount of horseradish is given. For this volume of dressing, about 1 cup of freshly grated root is a reasonable starting point; add the liquid gradually and stop when it looks like a loose relish rather than a soup.
- Grating fresh rootThe heat is volatile and released by cutting, so grate near an open window or in a food processor with the lid on, and keep your face away when you lift it. Peel only the part you are using.
- Vinegar sets the heatAcid stops the enzyme reaction that builds pungency. Add the vinegar mixture immediately for a mild sauce, or let the grated root sit two or three minutes first for a fiercer one.
- Prepared horseradish insteadBottled horseradish is already packed in vinegar, so cut the gill back to a few tablespoons and taste as you go, or the sauce will be thin and flat.
- Yield and keepingAbout a cup and a half, enough for eight or so servings alongside roast or boiled beef. Refrigerated in a sealed jar it holds its sharpness for a week or two, after which it loses pungency and darkens.
Horseradish with beef is one of the oldest surviving English condiment pairings, generally traced to the seventeenth century, when the root moved from the apothecary's shelf to the table; earlier writers treated it chiefly as a medicine. This version belongs to the family of cold vinegar dressings rather than the creamed sauces familiar from British and American cookbooks, where whipped or sour cream softens the heat. Mustard and horseradish both owe their bite to the same class of compounds released when the plant tissue is broken, which is why the two reinforce each other here rather than competing. The recipe appears in The Home Cook Book, a Toronto community compilation of the 1870s built from contributed household formulas.