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Mushroom Sauce
To 1 cupful of brown sauce add 1/2 cupful mushrooms, either canned or fresh, cut into small pieces. Roll the mushrooms in butter and saute in butter. Mix them with the sauce, bring to a boil, and a tablespoonful of lemon juice or half a wineglass of sherry or port wine. Serve with roast beef or steak.
A short finishing sauce built on a cupful of brown sauce, meant to be made while the roast rests. Nearly everything depends on the base sauce being good to begin with.
- Brown sauceThis means a basic espagnole or a roux-based meat gravy — flour cooked in butter until nut-brown, moistened with beef stock and simmered until it coats a spoon. A cup of good jarred demi-glace or a well-reduced pan gravy stands in without complaint.
- Half a wineglassA wineglass in period cookery is about 2 fl oz, so half is 2 tablespoons — the same order as the tablespoon of lemon juice offered as an alternative. It is a seasoning, not a liquid addition.
- Add the wine off the boilSherry or port stirred in while the sauce is at a rolling boil loses its aroma within seconds. Bring the sauce to a boil to marry it with the mushrooms, then draw it off the heat and stir the wine or lemon juice in at the end.
- Mushroom preparationFresh mushrooms should go into a hot pan with butter in a single layer and be left alone until they have given up their water and browned; crowded, they stew grey. Canned mushrooms are already cooked — drain them well and give them only a minute in the butter to dry off the brine flavour.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half of finished sauce, going by the cup of base sauce, the half cup of mushrooms and the wine. It thickens as it stands and can be loosened with a spoonful of stock.
Mushroom sauce of this kind corresponds to the French sauce aux champignons, a small sauce built on a brown base rather than a mother sauce in its own right. The reliance on canned mushrooms fits the period: commercial canning was making the mushroom a more widely available pantry item in the decades either side of 1900, when fresh cultivated mushrooms were still largely a city-market item. The offer of lemon juice or sherry or port at the finish gives the cook a cheap option and a company option in the same line.