Home › Meat and Fish Sauces › White Mushroom Sauce
White Mushroom Sauce
Melt four tablespoons of butter, add one slice each of carrot and onion, a bit of bay leaf, sprig of parsley, six peppercorns, four tablespoons of flour, and slowly add two cups of white stock.
Cook five minutes, remove seasonings and add one-half can of mushrooms cut in pieces and one-half teaspoon of lemon juice. Salt and pepper to taste. Stella A. Downing.
A velouté with aromatics steeped in the roux stage, finished with mushrooms and lemon. Everything hinges on cooking the flour and butter long enough to lose the raw taste while keeping the sauce pale.
- White stockAn unroasted veal or chicken stock, made from bones blanched rather than browned, so the finished sauce stays ivory. Unsalted commercial chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced.
- Keep the roux blondFour tablespoons each of butter and flour to two cups of stock works out at two tablespoons of flour per cup, the usual proportion for a sauce that coats rather than pours thin. Cook the flour two or three minutes over gentle heat until it smells nutty but has taken no colour.
- Add the stock warmWarm the stock before whisking it in and add it in stages, as the recipe's "slowly add" implies; steady whisking is what keeps it smooth. Five minutes of cooking is about what the flour needs to lose its rawness.
- Half a can of mushroomsCan sizes varied, so treat this as an approximation: reckon on roughly a cup of drained pieces. Drain and rinse tinned mushrooms, or sauté about 4 oz of fresh button mushrooms in a little butter and fold them in at the end.
- Strain rather than fish out"Remove seasonings" is easier done by pouring the sauce through a fine sieve than by hunting peppercorns with a spoon. Do it before the mushrooms go in.
- The lemon goes in lastHalf a teaspoon is a small amount, enough to sharpen the sauce rather than make it taste of lemon. The recipe adds it with the mushrooms, at the end.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough to sauce chicken, veal, sweetbreads or poached fish for four to six.
White sauces of this kind are generally traced to the American cooking-school tradition that Good Housekeeping is often said to have drawn on: a butter-and-flour base, a light stock, and a short list of aromatics steeped and then removed, which resembles the classic velouté taught in French kitchens and adapted into turn-of-the-century domestic manuals. The instruction to use "one-half can of mushrooms" points to a period when canned mushrooms were widely available and comparatively cheap, though such cans were sold over several decades and so fix no precise date. Recipes signed with a contributor's name, as this one is, appear often in the magazine's kitchen pages, where readers are said to have submitted household formulas that were gathered into the cook books.