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Mushrooms, Sauce of, Brown
Button or flap mushrooms may be used for this sauce. They should be rinsed in cold water, drained, and dried in a soft cloth, and, if flap ones, cut into pieces. Simmer the mushrooms, without stalks, in half a pint of beef gravy, add a little mushroom ketchup, and an ounce of butter, blended with flour. If liked, flavour with lemon-peel, and squeeze in some of the juice before serving. Time, twenty to twenty-five minutes.
A brown mushroom sauce built on beef gravy and thickened with kneaded butter and flour — the standard Victorian accompaniment to steak, roast beef or a plain grilled chop. A few of the terms need translating.
- Flap mushrooms"Flap" means a mature open-cap field or horse mushroom, gills exposed and dark. Portobellos are the closest supermarket equivalent; "buttons" are the same species picked young, and can go in whole.
- Half a pintCassell's is a British book, so this is an imperial half-pint: 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Enough sauce for four.
- Beef gravyNot a flour-thickened gravy from a roast but an unthickened brown stock reduced for body — what a modern kitchen would call a good beef stock. Use a low-salt one, since the ketchup adds plenty of salt.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty liquid of pressed and spiced mushrooms, once in every larder and still made commercially in Britain. A teaspoon or two of Worcestershire sauce, or a splash of soy with a drop of malt vinegar, gives a similar savoury lift.
- Butter blended with flourThis is beurre manie: 1 oz butter mashed to a paste with roughly the same weight of flour, dropped in a little at a time and whisked.
- Don't rinse if you can avoid itThe instruction to rinse and dry belongs to an era of mushrooms that arrived with soil on them. Wipe cultivated mushrooms with a damp cloth instead; soaked caps release water into the sauce and dilute it.
- The timingTwenty to twenty-five minutes is for the whole simmer, which reduces the gravy and cooks the mushrooms through to a soft, dark texture. That is the point of the sauce — mushrooms kept firm and pale will not give the colour or the flavour it wants.
- LemonAdd the peel as a strip during simmering and fish it out; the juice goes in off the heat at the last moment, or the sauce turns sharp and the brown flavour flattens.
Mushroom ketchup, called for here almost as a matter of course, was the ancestor of the tomato ketchup that displaced it. Before the nineteenth century "ketchup" (from a Southeast Asian word for a fermented fish or soy brine, generally traced through Malay kecap) meant any thin, dark, keeping sauce, and in Britain the mushroom version was among the most common: salted mushrooms left to weep, then strained, spiced and boiled down into a bottle of concentrated savour that lasted the year. Cassell's, compiled in the 1870s and reissued for decades after, assumes every reader has a bottle on the shelf, which is why the recipe spends more words on drying the caps than on where the flavour actually comes from. The sauce itself belongs to the family of brown accompaniments, with the mushrooms cooked down soft.