Home › The World's Kitchen › Sauce, Britannia
Sauce, Britannia
Peel, core and finely slice four good-sized apples, place in a saucepan with half gill water and saltspoon salt, set pan on fire and cook till almost dry, which will take about fifteen minutes, being careful to stir very frequently meanwhile, then add one tablespoon freshly grated horseradish, mix well, press apple puree through sieve into a bowl, add two tablespoons orange marmalade, one ounce fine sugar and juice of an orange, mix thoroughly, pour sauce into a bowl and serve.
A sweet-sharp fruit sauce for cold roast beef, ham or pork. The measurements are Edwardian but all of them convert cleanly.
- Half a gillA gill is a quarter-pint: about 2 1/2 fl oz (70 ml) by imperial measure, or 2 fl oz (60 ml) if the book is working in US pints. Either way it is only there to keep the apples from catching before they release their own juice.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Treat it as seasoning, not structure.
- One ounce fine sugarFine sugar is caster sugar; an ounce is about 2 tablespoons. Add it after tasting, since marmalade and apple variety between them may already carry the sauce far enough. Bramleys or another tart cooking apple suit this better than a sweet eating apple.
- Fresh horseradish onlyThe recipe means the root, grated at the last moment. Bottled horseradish in vinegar or cream will throw the balance and dull the heat; if it is all you have, drain it and use rather less.
- Add the horseradish off the heatThe recipe places it after the apples are cooked but does not say to pull the pan off the fire. Do so anyway: the volatile compounds that give horseradish its bite are driven off quickly by heat, so add it once the pan is off the burner and do not reheat the sauce afterward.
- Cooking the applesFifteen minutes with frequent stirring, as the recipe directs, is about right for sliced apples reduced to a dry puree; keep the heat moderate. Watch the bottom of the pan; sugar-rich apples scorch quickly once the free water has gone.
- The sievePressing through a sieve was the usual route to a smooth puree in a kitchen of this date. A food mill gives the same result faster. A blender will work but shreds the horseradish into invisibility, which some cooks prefer and some do not.
- Yield and servingFour apples give roughly 1 1/2 cups, enough for six to eight as a condiment. Serve cool or at room temperature; it keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator, losing heat each day.
Apple sauce with roast pork and grated horseradish with beef are often said to be among the oldest fixed pairings in English cooking, and this sauce simply folds them into one bowl, then sweetens the result with marmalade and orange — a combination that reads as deliberately, almost heraldically, British, which is presumably the point of the name. Sauces christened after countries were a habit of the grand hotel and restaurant kitchens of the period, where a printed menu in French wanted a shorthand for a national flavor; The International Cook Book, the source of this recipe, collects them by the dozen. Bitter Seville marmalade was by then a thoroughly domestic British product, made in quantity in Dundee and elsewhere, so its appearance alongside horseradish is less eccentric than it looks: both were pantry staples, and both cut fat. Served cold with cold meat, this belongs to the sideboard tradition of the Edwardian buffet rather than to the hot dinner service.