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Brown Mushroom Sauce II
1 can mushrooms 1/4 cup flour 1/4 cup butter 2 cups Consomme or Brown Stock 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice Salt and pepper Drain and rinse mushrooms and chop finely one-half of same. Cook five minutes with butter and lemon juice; drain; brown the butter, add flour, and when well-browned, add gradually Consomme. Cook fifteen minutes, skim, add remaining mushrooms cut in quarters or slices, and cook two minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Use fresh mushrooms in place of canned ones when possible.
A classic brown roux sauce built on stock, with mushrooms used twice — half chopped and cooked into the base, half added whole at the end for texture. The whole point is the colour of the roux, so give it your attention.
- The hinge: brown the butter and flour properlyAfter the mushrooms come out, cook the butter until it smells nutty and turns light brown, then add the flour and keep stirring until it is the colour of a hazelnut shell. Take your time over it: the browned roux is the main source of the sauce's colour and much of its flavour. Stop short and you get pale, pasty gravy.
- Can sizeA period can of mushrooms was small, probably somewhere around a cup drained. If using fresh, start with about 8 oz (225 g) of button mushrooms and adjust; they will give better flavour and need no rinsing.
- Adding the stockPour the consommé in a little at a time, whisking each addition smooth before the next, or the browned roux will seize into lumps. Warm stock incorporates more easily than cold.
- Consommé or brown stockEither a good homemade beef stock or a low-sodium commercial beef broth works. Season only at the end — fifteen minutes of reduction concentrates whatever salt is already there.
- SkimmingDuring the fifteen-minute simmer, butterfat and scum rise to the surface. Skimming it off is what makes the difference between a glossy sauce and a greasy one.
- Two minutes at the endThe reserved quartered mushrooms want only a brief heating through. Longer and they shed water into the sauce and lose their bite.
- YieldAbout 2 cups of sauce.
Brown mushroom sauce belongs to the same family as the classic French brown sauces, simplified for households that kept stock on hand but no professional saucier. That this version begins with a can of mushrooms, with the instruction to use fresh "when possible" tacked on at the end, suggests a date when canned mushrooms were the more dependable pantry option for ordinary cooks. The two-stage treatment of the mushrooms — half cooked down for flavour, half added late for texture — is a technique still taught, and the lemon juice in the first stage both keeps the chopped mushrooms pale and sharpens a sauce that would otherwise be flatly rich.