Home › Cookery › Mushroom Sauce (Wash and pick one pint young)
Mushroom Sauce (Wash and pick one pint young)
Wash and pick one pint young mushrooms, rub them with salt to take off the tender skin. Put them in a saucepan with a little salt, nutmeg, one blade of mace, one pint cream, lump of butter rubbed in flour. Boil them up and stir till done, them pour it round the chickens. Garnish with lemon.--Mrs. C. C.
A cream sauce built on the English model, meant to be poured around a boiled or roasted fowl rather than over it. The proportions are generous and the method is sound; most of the work is translating the vessels and the mushroom handling.
- A pint of mushroomsMeasured by volume, not weight: about 5 to 6 oz of small whole button mushrooms. Quarter or halve anything larger than a walnut so they cook evenly.
- Rubbing with saltNineteenth-century recipes commonly direct that mushrooms be skinned or peeled; this one describes the skin as 'tender' rather than tough. Cultivated buttons need nothing but a wipe or a quick rinse, so skip the salt rub and salt the sauce instead.
- A blade of maceOne blade is a strip of the dried aril from a nutmeg; conversions vary, but it is usually reckoned at somewhere between a scant 1/4 and 1/2 teaspoon ground mace. Fish the blade out before serving if you use whole; the flavour is nutmeg-adjacent but drier and more floral.
- Butter rubbed in flourThis is beurre manié: about 1 tablespoon soft butter kneaded with 1 tablespoon flour, dropped into the hot liquid in small pieces. It thickens without the raw-flour taste of an unroasted roux.
- A pint of creamTwo cups of heavy cream, a generous quantity; note the recipe pours it round 'the chickens', plural. Half that quantity, with the butter and flour halved too, serves four generously.
- Boil them upThe mushrooms will throw off liquid, so give them a few minutes in the cream before the thickening goes in, or the sauce loosens later. Once thickened, keep it at a bare simmer and stir; hard boiling a flour-bound cream sauce makes it grainy and dulls the mace.
- ServingPour it in a pool around the bird on the platter, with thin lemon slices or wedges at the edge. The lemon is not decoration only, it cuts the cream when squeezed over the meat.
- If you gather your ownThe recipe assumes wild field mushrooms. Only use foraged specimens you can identify with certainty; several dangerous species pass for young buttons at the closed-cap stage.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, is a collection of contributions from named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why this sauce arrives signed "Mrs. C. C." rather than as an editorial instruction. The recipe is thoroughly English in ancestry: cream, mace and a butter-and-flour thickening are the standard eighteenth-century English treatment for mushrooms served with boiled fowl, and Virginia kitchens inherited that vocabulary more or less intact. The instruction to rub the caps with salt to take off the skin was common practice, though peeling was also directed for cultivated mushrooms, so it dates the recipe only loosely; cultivated white buttons were grown in beds under glass or in cellars on a smaller scale well before mushroom growing became a widespread American industry in the 1890s, and a pint of "young mushrooms" here may well have meant caps picked from pasture in late summer or autumn.