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Puree of Mushrooms
Clean a pottle of clean white button mushrooms; chop, adding the juice of a lemon to keep them from turning black; chop fine and put into a pan with a piece of butter size of an egg; stir them on the fire a few minutes; mix with this a small teacup of good white sauce; reduce the purée, then add a good teacup of rich cream; stir the purée over the fire again for about four minutes; rub through a fine sieve on to a dish; then put into a stewpan until needed.
CHAPTER XIV.
A straightforward mushroom purée in the French manner, obscured by three old measures: the pottle, the egg-sized butter and the teacup. Resolve those and the method is an hour's work at most.
- A pottle of mushroomsA pottle is a half-gallon measure, so roughly 2 quarts of button mushrooms by volume — call it 1½ to 2 lb. Mushrooms and soft fruit were sold by the pottle basket in English markets, which may be why a volume rather than a weight is given.
- Butter the size of an eggUsually reckoned at about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons, though period books are not wholly consistent about it.
- TeacupsA teacup of the period is variously reckoned at about 4 to 6 fl oz, smaller than a modern measuring cup. On that basis read "a small teacup" of white sauce as about 4 fl oz and "a good teacup" of cream as a generous 6 fl oz.
- White sauceMost likely a plain béchamel — butter and flour cooked together, then milk — though period "white sauce" was sometimes built on stock rather than milk. It serves as the binder here.
- The hinge: drive off the water firstMushrooms are mostly water, and the recipe's few minutes of stirring in butter is meant to drive that liquid off before the sauce goes in. If the pan is still wet, the finished purée will be thin no matter how long you reduce it afterwards.
- Lemon juiceAdded for colour rather than flavour, and it works — cut mushrooms discolour quickly. Use the juice of half a lemon if you want less acidity; a whole one is assertive against this quantity of mushrooms.
- Rubbing through a sieveA blender or food processor does this in seconds, though a drum sieve gives a finer, silkier result. Either way, pass the purée while hot.
- Holding in the stewpanThe purée was kept warm as a component — a bed for cutlets or game, a filling for vol-au-vents, a thickener for soup. Reheat gently and do not let a cream sauce boil hard, which will split it.
Mushroom purée belongs to the French repertoire that came to dominate English and American cookbooks in the later nineteenth century. It is a component rather than a dish: professional kitchens kept such preparations standing warm, ready to be spooned under a sautéed cutlet, folded into a sauce, or thinned into a soup, which is what the closing instruction to "put into a stewpan until needed" describes. The pottle is the older word here, a measure of two quarts long used for berries and small mushrooms sold in tapered baskets; it survived in English produce markets well past the point where anyone was still using it in the kitchen.