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Eighteen Button Mushrooms
One gill of Cream.
Fleurons for garnish.
Truss the chicken the same as for boiling; put it in a stewpan with enough boiling water to cover.
Boil up and remove the scum. Add the carrot, cut in slices, the onion, thyme, bayleaf, celery, parsley, cloves, peppercorns, mace, and the stock, and boil gently for about an hour, or till the fowl is quite done, then take it up and cut it into neat joints.
Meanwhile prepare the sauce. Put the butter and flour into a stewpan, and mix well together. Add the stalks and trimmings of the mushrooms and the chicken stock, first taking off the grease; stir till it boils, and let it boil gently for twenty minutes, with the lid half on; then skim off the butter which has risen to the top, and let it reduce to one pint. Flavour with lemon-juice. Add the cream, put the mushrooms and the pieces of chicken into a stewpan, tammy or strain the sauce over them, and, when quite hot, garnish with fleurons of puff paste.
This is a fricassée of boiled fowl in a velouté finished with cream, and the page has been printed with only the tail of its ingredient list — the title itself, "Eighteen Button Mushrooms," is a stray line from that list. Work from the method, which names everything you need.
- What the list should sayThe method calls for one chicken, one carrot, one onion, thyme, a bayleaf, celery, parsley, cloves, peppercorns, mace, stock, butter and flour for the roux, lemon juice, a gill of cream, eighteen button mushrooms, and puff paste for the fleurons. No weights are given for the butter and flour; about 1 oz of each per pint of finished sauce is the usual proportion for a sauce of this kind, and can be increased if you want it thicker.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, about 140 ml. Use a rich cream; a thin cream is likelier to curdle in a hot sauce sharpened with lemon.
- The fowlA boiling fowl of the period was an older laying hen and could take well over an hour. A modern 4–5 lb chicken is tender in 50–60 minutes at a bare simmer; check the thigh reads 165F rather than trusting the clock.
- Keep it below a boil"Boil gently" here means a lazy simmer with barely a tremor. A real boil shreds the breast and clouds the stock you are about to build the sauce on, and this dish lives or dies on a clear, glossy sauce.
- Mushroom stalks earn their placeThe trimmings go into the sauce to cook out for twenty minutes and are then strained away — that is where the flavour comes from. The eighteen buttons themselves are added whole at the end, only long enough to heat through, so they stay pale and firm.
- Reduce to one pintMeasure it. The pint is the target because the gill of cream will thin it again, and the lid half on is deliberate: enough evaporation to concentrate, slow enough to let the butter rise so you can skim it.
- TammyA tammy was a worsted cloth through which the sauce was wrung, giving a texture no sieve quite matches. A fine chinois plus a stick blender, or a pass through a doubled square of muslin, gets you there.
- FleuronsSmall crescents or rounds of puff paste, egg-washed and baked at 400–425F until risen and browned, then stood round the dish at the last moment. Bake them while the chicken simmers; they go soft if they sit in the sauce.
- YieldOne chicken, jointed, serves four as a main course with rice or plain boiled potatoes.
This is the English fricassée of chicken as it stood in the high-class professional kitchen of the period: the bird poached in an aromatic broth, the broth turned into a velouté with a butter-and-flour roux, the sauce reduced, sharpened with lemon and softened with cream, then poured over the joints. The vocabulary is French — fleurons, velouté, the tammy cloth — reflecting how far British high-class cookery of the period took its technique and its terms from the French professional tradition; books of this kind were written for cooks in large private houses expected to produce that idiom on demand. One detail is telling: the boiling fowl, a spent laying hen whose long simmer yielded the strong gelatinous stock the sauce depends on, and which has largely vanished from retail butchery. The title's count — eighteen button mushrooms — reflects the common older habit of specifying such things by number rather than weight.