Horse-radish or Albert Sauce

Sauce Albert (warm horseradish sauce for roast beef) teaches that sharpness must be managed, not merely added. The grated root simmers long enough to lose its raw aggression, then mustard and vinegar restore a clean, deliberate bite at the finish. Cook the mustard and that brightness disappears.

The original formula assumed a saucier on staff, white consommé never off the fire, prepared butter sauce at hand, and a tammy waiting for the final pass. At home, good finished consommé and prepared butter sauce provide the same foundation, while a fine-mesh sieve replaces the tammy honestly. That equipment is brigade scaffolding and can go. The twenty-minute horseradish simmer, brisk reduction, sieving, and liaison (egg-yolk binding) are the dish and must stay. The source proportions are halved into a dinner-party batch because one roast needs a sauceboat, not a service pot.

Finished properly, Sauce Albert falls from the spoon in a smooth ivory ribbon, rich with butter and cream but still unmistakably alive with horseradish. The liaison is the step that decides it: warm the yolk gently, never let the sauce boil, and add the mustard only after the pan leaves the heat.