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Rabbit, Mushroom Sauce For
Take a pint of young mushrooms, pick, rub, and wash, them, and sprinkle them with salt to take off the skin. Put them into a saucepan with a little salt, a blade of mace, a little nutmeg, a pint of cream, and a piece of butter rolled in flour: boil them up, and stir till done, then pour the sauce into the dish with the rabbit. If you cannot get fresh mushrooms, use pickled ones, and a little mushroom powder with the cream.
A plain cream-and-mushroom sauce of the eighteenth-century type, written to be poured over a boiled or roast rabbit. Two things need translating: the mushroom-cleaning ritual and the pint measures.
- Skip the salt-rubbing"Pick, rub, and wash, them, and sprinkle them with salt to take off the skin" refers to peeling the cuticle from field or cultivated buttons, once thought necessary. Modern mushrooms need only a wipe or a quick rinse; peeling costs you flavour and the salt draws out water you want to keep.
- PintsCassell's is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz. A pint of mushrooms is a volume, not a weight -- reckon on 8 to 10 oz of whole small buttons, quartered if larger.
- That much cream20 fl oz of cream to 8 oz of mushrooms makes a very loose sauce by current taste. Half the cream, or reduce it hard, gives something that coats the rabbit rather than flooding the dish.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: equal parts soft butter and flour kneaded to a paste, about 1 oz of each, whisked into the hot cream in small pieces. Add it at the end, not the start, or the flour will catch on the bottom of the pan.
- Do not let it boil hard"Boil them up" means bring it to the point of boiling and no further. Cream at a rolling boil with salt and acid mushroom juices in it will separate; keep it at a bare simmer and stir until it thickens, five to eight minutes.
- Blade of maceA blade is one flake of the dried aril from nutmeg, and keeps its aroma better than the pre-ground powder. Fish it out before serving. Ground mace at about a quarter teaspoon substitutes at a pinch.
- Pickled mushrooms and mushroom powderBoth were standing store-cupboard items. Pickled mushrooms will bring vinegar with them, so rinse and use a light hand or the cream will curdle. For mushroom powder, dried porcini or shiitake ground fine does the same job -- half a teaspoon is plenty.
- YieldEnough for one rabbit, serving four. Nutmeg and salt both want adjusting at the end, once the cream has reduced and concentrated.
Mushroom sauce for rabbit belongs to a family of white cream sauces that ran through English cookery books from the mid-eighteenth century onward; the phrasing here, down to the blade of mace and the butter rolled in flour, is close to the wording used by Hannah Glasse and her many copyists. The instruction to salt and skin the mushrooms reflects a period when a mushroom's identity, and cleanliness, could not be assumed. So does the fallback: fresh mushrooms had a short season and a shorter shelf life, so a Victorian kitchen kept them pickled in jars and dried and pounded to powder, and the recipe simply assumes both are on the shelf. Rabbit, meanwhile, was cheap common meat rather than a specialty, and a rich cream sauce was the usual way of dressing it up for the table.