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Mushroom Sauce (Roll a piece of butter)
Roll a piece of butter as large as an egg into one heaping easpoonful sifted flour; stir in two tablespoonfuls warm water; et it simmer. Pour in one teacup cream, and stir; throw in one pint young mushrooms, washed, picked, and skinned; add pepper, salt, another small piece of butter. Let it boil up once, shaking the pan well, and serve.--Mrs. S. T.
A simple cream-and-flour sauce built in the pan, meant to be spooned over beefsteak, poultry or toast. The only real technical demand is not overcooking it after the cream goes in.
- Butter the size of an eggReckon about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. The "another small piece of butter" at the end is roughly a further tablespoon; the recipe adds it with the seasoning before the final boil, not off the heat.
- Teacup of creamA Victorian teacup is smaller than a modern mug: 3/4 cup is the usual reading, and 1/2 cup will still work. Use heavy cream; light cream and half-and-half are more likely to break when the sauce boils up.
- The flourOne heaping teaspoon of flour to 4 tablespoons of butter is a very loose roux, so the sauce stays thin and pourable rather than setting. Let it simmer a minute or two with the water before the cream goes in, or the finished sauce will taste pasty.
- "Boil up once"This is the hinge. Bring it just to the surge of a boil, shaking the pan so the flour does not catch, then take it off. Held at a boil, a lightly thickened cream sauce will separate and the mushrooms will squeak out their liquid and dilute it.
- Skinned mushroomsNineteenth-century cooks peeled the caps of field mushrooms, whose skins were tough and often gritty. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need only a wipe and trimming; skip the peeling and simply halve or quarter anything larger than a bite.
- A pint of mushroomsBy volume, roughly 6 to 8 ounces by weight of small button mushrooms. They go in raw and cook only in the time it takes the sauce to come to a boil, which suits young mushrooms; older, larger ones are better sauteed in a little of the butter first and returned at the end.
- Wild mushroomsThe original assumes mushrooms gathered from a pasture by someone who knew them. Do not substitute foraged fungi unless they have been identified by someone competent to do so; buy cultivated mushrooms instead.
- YieldRoughly 1 1/2 to 2 cups with the mushrooms in it, enough to dress a steak or a chicken for four.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialed Virginia housewives, is full of these short, unfussy sauces credited to a neighbor or relation "Mrs. S. T." here. The recipe belongs to a moment when mushrooms in an American household were still largely a gathered, seasonal food: commercial mushroom growing in the United States did not become significant until the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the period often gave attention to distinguishing edible field mushrooms from poisonous ones alongside instructions for cooking them. The instruction to skin them, which reads as needless work today, is a direct trace of that: the loose, sometimes soiled cuticle of a meadow mushroom was worth removing, while the tight skin of a modern cultivated button is not. Sauces like this were served with broiled beefsteak, and the technique roll butter with flour, loosen with water, finish with cream is essentially a cook's shorthand for a beurre manie sauce made without a separate stock.