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Mushroom Sauce
Mix two ounces of butter and one teaspoonful of flour smoothly together; put it into a lined saucepan, and pour in one-third pint of milk; keep stirring it one way over a brisk fire; let it boil gently for a minute or two; add half a pint of mushrooms to the melted butter; let them simmer gently for about ten minutes and season to taste.
A plain white sauce enriched with mushrooms, written in imperial measures and for a tin-lined copper pan. The proportions are unusual by modern standards and worth reading closely before you start.
- The measuresAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so one-third pint is a scant 7 fl oz, about 3/4 cup of milk. Two ounces of butter is half a stick.
- Half a pint of mushroomsThis is a volume, not a weight: 10 fl oz of small mushrooms, perhaps 3 to 4 oz on the scale. The recipe does not say what size; if using larger cultivated mushrooms, slice them small.
- Butter to flourTwo ounces of butter to one teaspoon of flour is far more fat than thickener, and the result is a loose, buttery sauce that will separate if it sits. If you want it to hold and coat, use equal weights of butter and flour -- about 1/2 oz (1 tablespoon) butter to 1/2 oz (2 tablespoons) flour -- and hold back the rest of the butter to whisk in at the end.
- A lined saucepan'Lined' most often meant tin-lined copper, tinned because bare copper reacts with acidic foods, though enamelled ironware would also qualify. Any heavy stainless or enamelled pan does the job now.
- Stirring one wayKitchen lore, not chemistry. What matters is constant motion and a pan that heats evenly so the milk does not catch.
- The ten-minute simmerMushrooms shed a good deal of water in that time, which thins an already thin sauce. Cook them briefly in a little of the butter first, until the liquid they release has evaporated, then add them to the sauce.
- Season to tasteThe period seasoning would be salt, white pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or blade of mace, and sometimes a squeeze of lemon. Mushrooms need more salt than most cooks expect.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups of sauce with the mushrooms in it, enough for four servings alongside boiled or roast poultry.
Mushroom sauce of this kind belongs to the long English tradition of white sauces served with boiled fowl, veal and mutton, where the meat itself was deliberately mild and the sauce carried the flavour. Cultivated button mushrooms had been grown in beds in France since the seventeenth century, but they remained a seasonal and somewhat costly item, which is why so many nineteenth-century books also give recipes for mushroom ketchup and mushroom powder: ways of keeping the flavour on hand when the fresh article was unavailable. The instruction to use a lined saucepan and to stir over a brisk fire is stock cookery-book language of the period, a reminder that a sauce left unstirred would scorch within moments.