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Cream of Mushroom Soup
Chop Stems from 1/2 pound mushrooms, add Skins from mushrooms 1 slice onion and 3 cups chicken stock or 3 cups water in which carrots have been cooked, or 3 cups hot water in which 3 chicken bouillon cubes have been dissolved. Simmer 20 minutes and strain. Melt 4 tablespoons butter or margarine, add 4 tablespoons flour mixed with 1 1/2 teaspoons salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper. Add the strained stock and stir until soup boils. Add 2 cups scalded milk, and when soup again boils, serve in bouillon cups. This may be served at another meal if preferred.
TUNA FISH A LA KING IN PATTY CASES Cook 1 large green pepper 2 minutes in boiling salted water to which has been added 1/8 teaspoon soda. Drain and cut in strips. Cook 5 minutes in 1 1/2 tablespoons butter; remove pepper and to butter add 1 tablespoon cornstarch and 1 tablespoon flour; then add 3/4 cup highly seasoned chicken stock and 1/3 cup cream. Stir until sauce boils, add the peppers 1 pound can tuna fish separated in flakes 1 pimiento cut in strips Salt to taste and Few drops onion juice. Peel 1/2 pound mushroom caps, saute in 2 tablespoons butter, and add to tuna fish. Serve from the chafing dish or in Patty cases. Two cups cooked chicken, cut in strips, or two cups crab meat may be used instead of tuna fish.
Two courses from a single luncheon menu: a stock-based mushroom soup that uses the trimmings, and a chafing-dish à la king built on the caps. Read them as one shopping list, since a pound of mushrooms covers both.
- Mushroom skinsThe instruction to peel mushrooms belongs to an era of field and coarsely grown mushrooms. Modern cultivated white mushrooms need no peeling; simply use the stems plus a few whole mushrooms, chopped, to build the soup stock.
- Salt and bouillon cubes1 1/2 teaspoons salt in the roux assumes unsalted homemade stock. With bouillon cubes or commercial broth, add none at the start and season only at the end.
- Scalded milkScalding meant heating to just below boiling, a step that dates from the handling of raw milk (explained variously as killing bacteria or deactivating enzymes). With pasteurized milk it serves mainly to keep the soup from cooling; warm it rather than boiling it, and do not let the finished soup boil hard after the milk goes in.
- YieldThe soup makes about five cups, which in bouillon cups is six small servings. The tuna à la king serves four to six depending on the size of the shells.
- Soda in the green pepperThe pinch of baking soda was a trick for holding bright green color. It also softens vegetable cell walls and dulls the flavor; blanch the pepper in plain salted water instead.
- The tuna canA one-pound can of tuna is no longer a standard retail size. Use two 5-ounce cans, drained, or about 10 to 12 ounces total. Fold it in at the end and stir as little as possible so the flakes stay whole.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, a few drops only. Grated onion pulp or a small amount of onion powder will do the same work.
- Patty casesThese are baked puff pastry shells, the small vol-au-vent kind sold frozen. Bake them empty and fill at the last moment; the sauce softens them within minutes.
- Chafing dishIf serving from a warming dish, hold the mixture over hot water rather than direct flame. Cornstarch and flour sauces thin out and separate when held hot too long.
This page comes from a menu-organised source, where the point was not a single dish but a whole luncheon planned so that one purchase served two courses: the mushroom stems and peelings go into the soup, the caps into the " la king. "" la king" is generally traced to American hotel and restaurant cooking around the turn of the twentieth century, and by the 1930s it had become a household formula rather than a specific dish, meaning almost anything in a cream sauce with pimiento and green pepper. That canned tuna sits comfortably in place of chicken or crab says a great deal about the period; tuna canning expanded rapidly in California in the first decades of the century, and by the time this menu was written the can was a respectable thing to serve guests in a pastry shell. The chafing dish, kept hot at the table over a spirit lamp, was the tool that made this kind of entertaining possible without a cook.