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Salt and Pepper (Three gills of Milk)
Three gills of Milk.
One teaspoonful of Flour.
One tablespoonful of Cream.
Peel and take away the stalks, cut up mushrooms in dice, cook until tender in milk with salt and pepper. When tender thicken with flour, add the butter, and, last of all, the cream.
This is a mushroom sauce whose ingredient list has clearly been garbled in setting — the mushrooms and butter appear only in the method, and the title has picked up the seasoning line. Read the method as the authority and treat the quantities as a starting point.
- Three gills of milkA gill is a quarter-pint: 1 1/2 US cups (about 350 ml) on American measure, or 15 imperial fl oz (about 425 ml) if the book is British. The tablespoon of cream at the end is enrichment, not the body of the sauce.
- The missing mushroomsNo quantity is given. For 1 1/2 cups of milk, 8 oz (225 g) of button or chestnut mushrooms, peeled or not as you like, diced small, gives a sauce that is properly mushroom-flavoured without turning to stew.
- The missing butter"Add the butter" refers to an ingredient never listed. A tablespoon (about 15 g) is a reasonable amount. The recipe's own order is flour first, then butter; working the butter into the flour as a beurre manié instead is a departure from the text, though it gives a smoother finish than flour stirred in dry.
- One teaspoon of flour is not enoughA teaspoon will barely veil 1 1/2 cups of milk. If you want a coating sauce rather than a thin one, use a tablespoon of flour with an equal weight of butter; if you want the original's near-broth consistency, leave it as written and reduce the milk a little instead.
- Cook the mushrooms in the milk, not beforeThe whole point of the method is that the mushrooms give up their liquor into the milk, which then becomes the sauce. Ten to twelve minutes at a bare simmer is enough for diced mushrooms; longer and they go grey and slack.
- Milk will catchUse a heavy pan and keep the heat low. Milk simmered with flour scorches on the bottom quickly, and a scorched mushroom sauce cannot be rescued.
- Cream goes in off the heat"Last of all, the cream" is deliberate. Add it once the pan is off the burner so it does not split or thin the thickening you have just built.
- YieldThe milk alone is about 1 1/2 cups; with the mushrooms in it the finished sauce comes to appreciably more. Enough for about four servings alongside chicken, veal, poached eggs or toast.
Mushroom sauce built on milk rather than stock belongs to a long repertoire of white sauces, where a béchamel base was flavoured with whatever the larder offered — oysters, capers, parsley, mushrooms. The instruction to peel the mushrooms is period-typical, and the reason usually given is that the skins were thought to coarsen and darken the sauce, so cooks skinned them to keep it pale. Modern cultivated mushrooms are picked young and need no peeling. The state of this entry, with its ingredients half in the title and half missing from the list, is also characteristic of the era's compilations, which assumed a reader who already knew that a white sauce means butter and flour in roughly equal measure.