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Half a Carrot (Gill of Mushroom Liquor)
Half a gill of Mushroom Liquor.
Peel the onion and carrot and mince them very finely, fry them in a little butter to a nice colour, drain off the butter and moisten with the wine and mushroom liquor, let this reduce well, then add the fish stock or liquor left in the pan in which the fish to be served with this sauce is cooked. Boil it up again and add the Espagnole Let this simmer for ten minutes, then strain it through a fine strainer or cloth; add a small piece of butter, and season if necessary with sauce.
H a few drops of lemon juice, salt and pepper, and keep hot.
P.S. If you have no Espagnole sauce handy, use as a substitute half an ounce of flour, half an ounce of butter, well kneaded and diluted with half a pint of stock; boil well, and use as directed.
This is a brown wine sauce for fish, printed with its ingredient list badly mangled — the heading has swallowed part of it, and only the onion, carrot, wine and mushroom liquor survive in the method. Quantities have to be inferred, so treat it as a technique rather than a formula.
- Half a gillA British gill is a quarter of a pint, so half a gill is about 2 1/2 fl oz, or a scant 1/3 cup. The finishing stock in the postscript, half a pint, is 10 fl oz British — call it 1 1/4 cups.
- The missing amountsThe only quantities printed are half a carrot, half a gill of mushroom liquor, and the half ounce of flour, half ounce of butter and half pint of stock in the postscript; the onion, wine and Espagnole are unquantified. For a sauce built on half a pint of stock, one small onion, half a carrot, and 2 to 3 fl oz of dry white wine or Madeira would be plausible proportions, but the original does not say.
- Mushroom liquorNot a commercial product but the strained cooking liquid from stewed mushrooms, or the liquid drained from tinned or bottled mushrooms. Soaking dried mushrooms in a little hot water and straining the result gives the same concentrated, slightly earthy note.
- EspagnoleThe classic brown sauce — brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix, tomato, simmered for hours and skimmed. The recipe does not say how much to use; the postscript's half-pint substitute implies a generous quantity rather than a spoonful or two. That substitute is a beurre manie (equal butter and flour kneaded raw) diluted with stock and boiled; use a well-browned beef or veal stock or the sauce will taste pale and floury.
- Drain off the butterThe vegetables are fried in butter for colour and the fat is then poured away, so the thickening comes from the Espagnole rather than the frying fat. Skipping it risks a greasy sauce.
- Reduce wellTake the wine and mushroom liquor down until the pan is nearly dry and syrupy before the fish stock goes in. That reduction is where the sauce gets its depth; ten minutes of simmering afterwards will not supply it.
- Fish stockThe instruction to use the liquor left in the pan the fish cooked in is the point of the sauce — it ties sauce and fish together. If the fish is grilled rather than poached, a light fish fumet made from bones and trimmings in twenty minutes will do.
- "Season if necessary with sauce"A typesetting casualty. The intended reading is almost certainly a seasoning sauce of the period — Harvey's, mushroom ketchup or anchovy essence — added a few drops at a time along with the lemon juice.
- YieldEnough for about four portions of poached or grilled white fish; the finished quantity depends on the unstated amount of Espagnole and fish liquor. Add the final butter off the heat and do not let it boil again, or the sauce will break.
Sauces of this kind — brown, wine-based, finished with fish cooking liquor — sat at the point where the classical French repertoire met the British fish course. In a professional kitchen the brown sauce was a standing stock item, simmered and skimmed at length, from which small sauces were struck off quickly; the domestic cook had no such larder, which is why the postscript offers a kneaded butter-and-flour thickening as a fallback. Mushroom liquor is a common ingredient in books of this period as a cheap source of savoury depth, doing something like what a modern cook might use stock concentrate or soy for. Brown fish sauces of this type resemble the Genevoise and Italienne families of the French repertoire, though the page has lost its name and no attribution can be made with confidence.