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Cream of Mushroom Soup
1/2 lb. mushrooms 4 cups White Stock III 1 slice onion 1/4 cup butter 1/4 cup flour 1 cup cream Salt Pepper 2 tablespoons Sauterne Chop mushrooms, add to White Stock with onion, cook twenty minutes, and rub through a sieve. Reheat, bind with butter and flour cooked together, then add cream and salt and pepper to taste. Just before serving add wine.
A classic blond-roux cream soup that depends on a good light stock and on restraint at the end: nothing should boil once the cream and wine go in.
- White Stock IIIA cross-reference to the book's own stock chapter — a mild, unbrowned stock of veal and/or chicken bones with aromatics. A low-sodium chicken stock is the closest supermarket equivalent; avoid anything roasted or dark, which will muddy the colour.
- The hinge: add the wine off the heatSauterne (here meaning a plain white wine, not necessarily the sweet Sauternes of Bordeaux) is stirred in at the last moment so its aroma survives. Two tablespoons in roughly five cups of soup is a seasoning, not a flavour base; boil it and you lose the point of it.
- Rubbing through a sieveAn immersion blender or upright blender does the work in seconds, though a pass through a fine sieve afterwards still gives the smoother texture the original intends. Blend hot soup in batches with the lid vented.
- Cook the roux paleEqual parts butter and flour, cooked together two to three minutes over medium heat until it smells nutty but takes no colour. Whisk the hot soup into it, or the roux into the soup off the boil, then simmer a few minutes to lose any raw-flour taste.
- MushroomsHalf a pound of ordinary cultivated white or cremini mushrooms, stems included — the stems carry much of the flavour and will be sieved out anyway. Twenty minutes of simmering is right here: this is an extraction, not a saute.
- CreamThe recipe does not specify a grade of cream. Heavy cream gives the richer, more familiar result; half-and-half keeps it lighter and closer to a broth-based soup.
- SeasoningNo salt quantity is given; the recipe leaves it to taste. Season after the cream goes in, since cream flattens salt, and use white pepper if you want to keep the soup unspeckled.
- YieldAbout five cups — three to four generous servings, or more in small cups as a first course.
Cream soups built on a white stock, a blond roux and a finish of cream belong to the domestic-science cooking of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when American cookery schools were teaching French sauce method as a set of repeatable formulas; the numbering of "White Stock III" reflects a book that gave several stock variants. Cultivated mushrooms became more widely available in American markets in this period, grown in cellars and later in the mushroom houses of southeastern Pennsylvania, which may be part of why mushroom soup appears in books of this era as something slightly refined rather than as a country dish. The spoonful of white wine at the end is a small flourish of the same school.