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Cold Horseradish Sauce
Scrape the skin off a fresh root of horseradish and then finely grate it into a bowl, add the same quantity fresh bread crumbs, season with three saltspoons salt, half teaspoon sugar, one saltspoon white pepper, one light teaspoon vinegar and half teaspoon finely chopped chives. Sharply beat the whole well together with a wooden spoon, then gradually pour in one gill cream, briskly mixing while adding it, let rest for thirty minutes in the ice box, then use as required.
A cold, bread-thickened horseradish cream of the German and Austrian school, and one of the few uncooked sauces in the book. Everything depends on the root being fresh.
- A gill of creamOne gill is half a cup, 4 fl oz in American measure (the British gill is 5 fl oz). Heavy cream gives the body the sauce needs.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons of salt is therefore about 3/4 teaspoon, and one saltspoon of white pepper a scant 1/4 teaspoon.
- Fresh root onlyGrate the horseradish shortly before mixing. The heat comes from volatile mustard-oil compounds released by grating, and it begins to fade quite quickly; jarred prepared horseradish is already acidulated and will throw the vinegar and salt out of balance.
- Grate at arm's lengthFreshly grated horseradish releases fumes far stronger than onion. Work in a ventilated spot, or pulse it in a food processor and lift the lid away from your face.
- The breadcrumbsSoft fresh crumbs from a plain white loaf, not dried or seasoned crumbs. They swell in the cream and are what keeps the sauce from separating; dry crumbs will drink the cream and leave it pasty.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no quantity for the root, so yield depends on the root you use; the crumbs are matched to it and only the cream is fixed at half a cup. The half-hour rest lets the crumbs hydrate, and the sauce is best eaten the day it is made, as the pungency fades.
- ServingThis is a cold sauce for hot or cold boiled beef, tongue, ham, trout or smoked eel. Do not warm it, as heat destroys the bite and can curdle the cream.
Horseradish with boiled beef is a fixture of Central European cooking, from Viennese Tafelspitz to the Bavarian and Czech tables, and the bread-and-cream version here belongs to the Austrian and Bavarian Kren family of sauces — Semmelkren, Sahnekren, Apfelkren — with the apple left out. The bread does two jobs: it stretches an expensive root and it holds the cream in suspension without cooking or egg yolk, a trick common to older sauces from bread-thickened Spanish and Italian preparations onward. Its appearance in The International Cook Book is exactly the point: Alexander Filippini's generation of hotel chefs were putting continental service sauces in front of American home cooks. The plant itself is a brassica, and the heat is the same class of mustard-oil compound found in mustard seed and wasabi, which is why it flashes on the nose rather than burning the tongue.