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Mushroom Sauce
4 tablespoons butter. 5½ tablespoons flour. 2 cups brown stock. 1½ can small mushrooms. 1 egg yolk slightly beaten. 2 teaspoons butter. 1/2 tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce. 1/2 teaspoon Kitchen Bouquet.
Salt, pepper.
PROCESS: Brown butter richly (without burning) in a sauce-pan; add flour and continue browning, stirring constantly. Pour on stock slowly, continue stirring until sauce is smooth. Drain mushrooms from the liquor and sauté them delicately in butter. Remove from range, add egg yolk and Worcestershire Sauce; add Brown Sauce slowly, stirring constantly. Reheat over hot water and season with salt, pepper and Kitchen Bouquet.
A brown roux sauce enriched with egg yolk at the end. The order matters more than anything else here: the yolk is off the heat, and the finished sauce is reheated only over water.
- Do not boil after the yolk goes inOnce the egg yolk is added the sauce cannot return to direct heat, or it will curdle and go grainy. The instruction to "reheat over hot water" means a double boiler or a bowl over barely simmering water, held below about 180F.
- 1½ cans of mushrooms1 1/2 cans of mushrooms -- The recipe gives no tin size, so the total is uncertain; a small period tin might be 4 oz or 8 oz, making the sauce anywhere from about 6 to 12 oz of drained mushrooms. Fresh button mushrooms, halved and sauteed until their liquid has cooked off, can be substituted.
- The mushroom liquorThe recipe drains it away, which is wasteful. It can replace part of the stock, though it will make the sauce saltier, so season at the very end as directed.
- Brown stockBeef or veal bones roasted before simmering. A good unsalted commercial beef stock is a reasonable substitute; salted stock plus Worcestershire and Kitchen Bouquet will overshoot on salt.
- Kitchen BouquetA caramel-and-vegetable browning liquid, still manufactured and sold. It is used chiefly for colour, though the recipe adds it at the end alongside salt and pepper as a seasoning; gravy browning does much the same job, or leave it out if the roux is dark enough.
- Browning the rouxThe recipe browns the butter first, then adds the flour and keeps browning. Work over moderate heat, stirring constantly as directed, until the roux takes colour; if it smells acrid it has burned and must be started again.
- Adding the stockAdd the stock gradually, as directed, stirring or whisking smooth before the next addition; adding it all at once is what produces lumps.
- YieldUpwards of two cups once the mushrooms are folded in; a serving sauce for a roast, steak, or braised joint.
This is a standard component sauce from the era when American cookery books were teaching households a simplified version of the French kitchen's mother sauces: a brown roux, brown stock, and then a garnish and a finish. Fannie Farmer and her contemporaries drilled the same structure. The finishing egg yolk marks it as a liaison in the older sense, thickening and enriching at once, a step that has largely dropped out of home brown-sauce making in favour of butter or cream. The tinned mushrooms are worth noticing, as are the bottled Worcestershire and Kitchen Bouquet, which belong to the moment when proprietary flavourings were becoming ordinary pantry items rather than novelties.