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Cream Sauce with Mushrooms
Make a Cream Sauce, add one cup of fresh mushrooms chopped fine, or the same quantity of canned mushrooms, and cook over boiling water ten minutes. If canned mushrooms are used, simply heat, do not cook, as it toughens the mushrooms.
This sauce may be used the same as Cream Sauce.
A derivative sauce that assumes you have already made the book's Cream Sauce, and that you are working over water rather than direct heat. Both assumptions need translating.
- The base sauceA cream sauce of this period is roughly 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour and 1 cup milk or thin cream, seasoned with salt and a little white pepper. Cook the flour in the butter a minute before adding the liquid, or the sauce tastes pasty.
- "Cook over boiling water"This means a double boiler, or a bowl set over a pan of simmering water. Cookbooks of the period often recommended it for flour-thickened sauces, to prevent scorching and to spare the cook constant stirring on a coal range; a heavy saucepan over low heat does the same job faster.
- Fresh mushrooms, chopped fineTen minutes over water will cook them, but they release liquid as they go and will thin the sauce. Sautéing the chopped mushrooms in a little butter first, until the moisture has driven off, gives better flavour and keeps the consistency where you want it.
- The instruction that mattersRorer is right about canned mushrooms: they are already fully cooked in the can, and reheating them in a hot sauce is all they need. Extended simmering turns them squeaky and rubbery.
- Mushroom varieties"Fresh mushrooms" at this date meant cultivated or field mushrooms. Cremini behave the same way and taste more of something; avoid the very dark gilled varieties here, as they will grey the sauce.
- SeasoningThe recipe leaves it to the base sauce. A grating of nutmeg, a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of sherry stirred in at the end all suit a mushroom cream sauce.
- Yield and useA cup of cream sauce with a cup of mushrooms stirred in makes appreciably more than a cup of finished sauce; use it over poached chicken, fish, toast or boiled vegetables. It thickens as it stands; loosen with warm milk rather than reheating hard.
Cream sauce with mushrooms is a household American milk-and-flour sauce that appears in domestic cookbooks in the later nineteenth century, as tinned mushrooms came into use. Supply is the point of the recipe: fresh cultivated mushrooms were still a seasonal, city-market item, while tinned ones sat on the shelf year round, and Rorer's cooking-school books name both options and tell the reader how each behaves. Its presence in a collection of hot weather dishes reflects the period logic of summer cooking — a small sauce made over water in a few minutes, used to dress cold or lightly poached meat and fish, so the range need not be fired up for a roast.