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Six Mushrooms (One ounce of Butter)
One ounce of Butter.
A. sprig of Thyme.
Bayleaf. One gill of Sherry.
One ounce of Flour.
Half a pint of Second Stock.
Chop the shalots and mushrooms and fry them in the butter with the flour, thyme, and bayleaf, till a good brown; then add the sherry, let it boil till reduced to half the quantity. Add the stock, and boil for ten minutes. Strain it, and it is ready for use.
A brown mushroom and sherry sauce of the classic hotel type — essentially a small espagnole finished with wine. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so read the method first.
- Missing shallotsThe method says to chop shallots, but they never appear in the list of quantities. Two or three shallots suits the scale of the other ingredients; the printed list has clearly lost a line.
- A gill of sherryA gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, so about 5 fl oz or a scant 2/3 cup. Half a pint of stock is 10 fl oz imperial, roughly 1 1/4 cups.
- Second stockIn a Victorian professional kitchen this is the weaker second extraction drawn from bones already used for first stock. A good unsalted brown beef or veal stock, or first stock let down with a little water, gives the same result — the sauce reduces, so a heavily salted commercial stock will finish harsh.
- The hinge: brown the roux properlyEverything depends on frying the flour, butter, shallots and mushrooms to a genuine brown before any liquid goes in. Stop short and the sauce is pale and pasty; take it too far and the flour loses thickening power and turns bitter. Work over moderate heat and stir constantly.
- Reducing the sherryBoil the sherry down by half to drive off the raw alcohol and concentrate the flavour. Use a dry or medium-dry sherry — a cream sherry will make the finished sauce cloyingly sweet against the brown stock.
- StrainingThe mushrooms and shallots are flavouring agents here, not garnish; the sauce is passed and they are discarded. Press the solids firmly in the sieve to extract everything, and remove the bayleaf and thyme stalk first.
- Yield and seasoningRoughly half a pint of finished sauce, depending on how far it reduces; enough to serve alongside steak, kidneys, game or a roast. The original gives no salt or pepper — season after straining, once the reduction has concentrated whatever salt the stock carried.
Sauces of this kind are the working currency of the late-Victorian and Edwardian professional kitchen, where a house stock might be drawn in two extractions — a rich first stock for consommés and glazes, a lighter second stock for everyday brown sauces. The structure belongs to the French repertoire that dominated British high-class cookery in this period: a brown roux, an aromatic base of shallot and mushroom, a wine reduction, then stock and a straining. Sherry rather than madeira or red wine is consistent with British taste and the sherry trade, sherry being a familiar sideboard bottle in well-stocked households. The ingredient heading is garbled, with "six mushrooms" carried into the title and the shallots missing from the list altogether.