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Morels, Sauce Of
Take fresh morels (when dried they impart little or no flavour to a dish), wash and stew them in a tightly closed pan, with a good lump of butter; when tender take out the morels, add some flour, let it brown in the butter, and use good gravy to make it of the proper consistency. Flavour with grated lemon-rind and juice. Put in the morels, and serve hot.
A short brown sauce built on the mushrooms' own butter-stewing liquor. The recipe gives no quantities, so read it as a method: the proportions below produce enough for four.
- Working quantitiesAbout 8 oz fresh morels, 1 oz butter, a rounded tablespoon of flour and roughly 1 cup (8 fl oz) brown stock. Add the lemon at the end, off the heat, a teaspoon of juice at a time.
- Cook them through, alwaysRaw or barely cooked morels are well documented as causing vomiting and cramps; the compound responsible has never been securely identified, but thorough cooking prevents the effect. The recipe gives no time, only 'when tender': allow a good 8 to 10 minutes of stewing in the closed pan. Do not shorten it, and do not taste them raw.
- Know what you haveTrue morels (Morchella) are hollow from cap to stem base with a pitted, honeycombed cap. The brain-shaped false morel, Gyromitra esculenta, is a different fungus and is seriously toxic to some people however it is cooked. Buy from a reliable source rather than guessing.
- GritThe pits hold sand. Halve them lengthwise, rinse briefly under running water, and drain on a cloth. Do not soak fresh ones for long or they turn to sponge and dilute the liquor the recipe depends on.
- The pan liquor is the sauceWhen you lift out the morels, whatever butter and dark juice remains is the flavour base. Make the roux in that, in the same pan, and scrape the bottom as it browns.
- "Good gravy"In Victorian usage 'gravy' generally means a strong brown meat stock rather than thickened drippings from a roast. Unsalted brown veal or chicken stock, well reduced, is the closest modern stand-in; season at the end, since reduction concentrates salt.
- Brown the flour properlyGive the roux three or four minutes over moderate heat until it smells biscuity and turns the colour of weak coffee, then add the stock a little at a time. Flour dumped into butter and wetted at once gives a pasty sauce.
- On the dried-morel claimThe parenthesis is simply wrong by modern standards. Dried morels are intensely, almost smokily flavoured; rehydrate them in warm water for 20 minutes and strain the soaking liquid into the sauce. The Victorian product was probably poorly dried and stale.
- ServingAbout a cup of finished sauce, enough for four. It belongs with veal, sweetbreads, roast chicken or poached eggs; the lemon is there to cut the butter and stock, so keep it restrained.
Morels have long held a position closer to truffles than to ordinary mushrooms in European cookery, chiefly because they resist cultivation: they fruit in spring, in burnt ground and woodland, and until very recently could only be gathered, never grown. That scarcity is why a book like Cassell's, written for a solidly middle-class Victorian household, treats them as an occasional luxury, and dried morels reached British grocers as an article of Continental trade. The English name comes through the French morille; a link with the German Morchel is often suggested but the derivation is not settled. The sauce itself is textbook French method as taught in Britain at the time: sweat the garnish in butter under a lid, build a brown roux in the resulting fat, let good stock down into it, and finish with an acid to lift the whole thing.