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To Stew Canned Mushrooms
A can of mushrooms, 1 tablespoonful of butter, 1 tablespoonful of flour, Yolk of one egg, A tablespoonful of sherry, ½ pint of milk, Salt and pepper to taste.
Drain the mushrooms and wash in cold water. Put the butter in a porcelain or granite saucepan, add the mushrooms, stir over the fire about five minutes; dust them with flour, add the milk and stir continually until boiling hot, add the salt and pepper. Take from the fire, add the wellbeaten yolk of the egg and the wine, and serve. In cooking canned mushrooms do not allow them to boil more than five minutes, as they are already cooked, and a second cooking toughens the mushrooms and renders them very indigestible.
A quick creamed mushroom dish that stands or falls on restraint: the mushrooms are already cooked, so all the heat goes into the sauce.
- The hingeCanned mushrooms are fully cooked in the can. Five minutes in the butter and a bare boil in the milk is all they will take; longer and they turn rubbery and squeaky, which is exactly what the original warns against.
- The milk quantity is doubtful"1½ pint of milk" against one tablespoon each of butter and flour would give thin soup, not a stew. Half a pint (1 cup) is closer to the usual proportion for a thin white sauce and may be what was meant. Start with a cup and add more only if it is too thick.
- Can sizeThe recipe does not say what size can was meant, and period tins varied. Something in the region of 8 oz drained is a reasonable modern stand-in: two 4 oz cans of stems and pieces, or one 8 oz can of sliced.
- Draining and washingRinsing in cold water removes the tinny brine, which is worth doing. Drain them well and pat dry, or the water will thin the sauce.
- Porcelain or granite panGranite ware meant enamelled steel. The point was to avoid bare iron or tin, which discolours a white sauce; any non-reactive pan does the job.
- Tempering the yolkBeat the yolk with a spoonful of the hot sauce before stirring it into the pan off the heat, and do not return the pan to the burner. Yolk added to boiling milk scrambles into threads.
- SherryUse a dry or medium amoroso-style sherry, not cooking sherry, which is salted. Added at the end it stays aromatic; boiled, it goes flat.
- Yield and servingEnough for four as a side or as a filling for toast points, patty shells or baked potatoes. It does not hold or reheat well, both because of the yolk and because the mushrooms toughen.
Canned mushrooms were a genuine convenience when this book was written: tinned French mushrooms — champignons de Paris — were a pantry staple in households that wanted the flavour year-round. That explains the tone of the closing note, which reads like a correction of a common error: cooks used to fresh mushrooms may well have treated the canned kind the same way and stewed them to leather. The finish of egg yolk and sherry stirred in off the fire is standard nineteenth-century practice for enriching a white sauce, the same move that finishes a velouté into a sauce allemande, used wherever a dish was meant to seem a little more refined than creamed vegetables on toast.