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Brown Horseradish Sauce
Boil in a saucepan for five minutes half gill tomato sauce, and half gill demi-glace, with a tablespoon fine, white, freshly grated horseradish, thoroughly stir with a wooden spoon, and serve.
A two-ingredient compound sauce with a grating of horseradish stirred in at the end. The only real decision is how long it cooks, because heat is the enemy of horseradish.
- Half a gillA gill is 5 fl oz in British measure and 4 fl oz (half a cup) in American, so half a gill is roughly 2 to 2 1/2 fl oz, about 4 to 5 tablespoons. Either way this makes a small quantity of sauce, enough for a couple of servings alongside boiled beef, roast beef or tongue.
- Demi-glaceIn classical usage, espagnole sauce reduced with brown veal or beef stock to a glossy, coating consistency. A good commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted to that consistency does the job; a reduced unsalted beef stock is the fallback, though it will be thinner and less glossy.
- Tomato sauceIn a book of this vintage this means a cooked, sieved, lightly seasoned tomato purée from the kitchen's stockpot — not a garlicky pasta sauce and not ketchup. Passata simmered down with a knob of butter is the closest ready equivalent.
- The five minutesAs written, the horseradish goes into the pan with the two sauces and boils with them for the full five minutes. Horseradish loses much of its volatile pungency on boiling, so if you want it to stay sharp, stir it in off the heat at the end -- but that is a departure from what the recipe says.
- Freshly grated"Fine, white, freshly grated" is meant literally. Grate from a peeled root on the finest holes and use it at once — cut horseradish fades within the hour. Bottled horseradish is packed in vinegar and will sour the sauce; if you use it, drain it and reduce the quantity.
- Wooden spoonThe recipe simply specifies one. Tomato is acidic, and acidic mixtures cooked or stirred in bare aluminium or unlined copper can pick up a metallic taste, so a nonreactive pan is a sensible precaution.
- ServingServe hot but not boiling, in a sauceboat. It will not hold well — the horseradish dulls on standing and over a burner — so make it as the meat is being carved.
Horseradish and beef is one of the oldest fixed pairings in northern European cooking, and by the nineteenth century English and German kitchens both served the root grated raw, or bound with cream, alongside boiled and roasted meats. What this recipe does is push it through the French professional system: instead of cream, the horseradish goes into demi-glace, the reduced brown stock that underpinned much of the saucework in a restaurant kitchen of the period, with tomato added for colour and acidity — hence "brown" rather than the familiar white horseradish sauce. That mode of building sauces from a base of stored mother sauces is what made a large hotel kitchen possible, and a collection like this reflects an era when professionally trained chefs were translating regional condiments into the standardized grammar of the brigade.