Most of us know horseradish as a spoonful of grated root beside the Sunday roast beef. It’s sharp and pungent, and grating it makes your eyes stream.
We file it under condiment, and that’s it. Yet great clumps of it grow along footpaths and railway banks. The leaves look a lot like dock, so people walk straight past, unaware of how much the plant has shared itself with humanity down the centuries.
Over 600 years ago, a Catalan confectioner wrote down a sweet horseradish recipe. The Llibre de totes maneres de confits, a fourteenth-century book of candying recipes, gives it a chapter of its own: Per confegir lo rave gualesch, “to candy the horseradish”.
The method is laborious, to put it mildly. Nine days laborious, to be precise. That’s most likely why you’ve never heard of it. We live in a hyper-fast culture where food has to be on the table within 30 seconds of entering the kitchen. A slight exaggeration, but you get my drift.
First, scrape the root, wash it and chop it finely. I cut mine into chips about as thick as the frozen sweet potato fries in your supermarket. Heretical, I know.
Then boil the chips in water with a good fistful of salt until they’re very soft. Lift them out and keep them in cold water for nine days, changing the water every single day until the salt and the harsh heat have leached away.
Next, prepare and skim your honey or syrup. Add the horseradish and boil it hard until the syrup forms threads. You can tell it’s ready when you lift some on a spoon and it pulls into threads instead of running off like water. The manuscript calls for a pound of honey to every pound of horseradish.
If you’d rather not spend nine days staring at a bucket of horseradish, here’s a faster modern version.
Candied horseradish
Makes 1 small tin
- 200g fresh horseradish root
- Pinch of sea salt
- 250g granulated sugar
- 250ml water
- Caster sugar, for coating
Scrub and scrape the horseradish until clean and white. Cut into 5cm strips, about half the thickness of a pencil. Drop into lightly salted boiling water and cook until tender, about 15 minutes, then drain.
Bring the sugar and water to a boil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the horseradish and turn down to a low simmer, stirring often. Chopsticks work well here because you can lift a drip of syrup at the same time and see whether it pulls into soft threads, at about 110°C. Once it does, take the pan off the heat. Lift the strips out one at a time onto a wire rack and leave them to dry for a few minutes, then roll each one in caster sugar.
Keeps in an airtight tin for several weeks.
The original manuscript puts this recipe alongside candied orange peel and other confits. That tells you something about how its makers saw it. This wasn’t a sauce for meat. It was something to eat at the end of a feast, something whose heat would linger on your palate.
It’s good to find an alternative to the horseradish-sauce-and-roast-beef cliché, and to realise it comes from 600 years of our own European heritage.
References
- Llibre de totes maneres de confits, Chapter 8, ‘Per confegir lo rave gualesch’. English translation by Vincent Cuenca.
- The modern method is adapted from ‘Candied Horseradish’ at Medieval Cookery.