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Mushroom Sauce
1 cup Brown Sauce cup canned mushrooms 1 egg yolk 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon kitchen bouquet salt, pepper, cayenne Chop mushrooms, sauté in butter, add egg yolk and kitchen bouquet; when well blended add Brown Sauce.
Reheat and serve, seasoning if necessary. 1 cup White Sauce Mushroom Sauce No. 2 1 cup fresh mushrooms 1 tablespoon mushroom catsup 1 tablespoon butter 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 tablespoon Worcestershire Sauce 1 teaspoon paprika 1 tablespoon wine Chop mushrooms, and sauté in butter; add to White Sauce; cook ten minutes. Add remaining ingredients and serve.
Two sauces run together here, both built on a mother sauce made elsewhere in the book: No. 1 on brown sauce (espagnole), No. 2 on a plain white sauce. The typesetting has lost at least one quantity, so read the list before you start.
- The missing measureThe mushroom quantity in No. 1 prints as "cup canned mushrooms" with the fraction dropped; ½ cup is the likeliest reading, though the original figure is lost. Half a cup of drained, chopped canned mushrooms to one cup of sauce is a workable proportion, and the stray "1 cup White Sauce" line belongs to No. 2, not to No. 1.
- The hinge: the egg yolkAdding a yolk to hot butter and mushrooms will scramble it unless the pan is off the heat and the yolk is stirred in fast, then thinned immediately with the brown sauce. After the sauce goes back on, keep it below a simmer; a boil curdles it and the sauce breaks into grains.
- Kitchen BouquetStill sold — a caramel-and-vegetable browning liquid. Its job is colour and a little savoury depth, not seasoning. A teaspoon in a cup of sauce is assertive; start with half.
- Mushroom catsupA thin, dark, salty liquid of salted mushrooms and spice, not a tomato ketchup. It has largely vanished from shops. A tablespoon of soy sauce or a good mushroom-based seasoning sauce gives a similar salty-umami hit; adjust the salt afterwards.
- "1 tablespoon wine"Unspecified, as period books often left it. For a white sauce a dry sherry or Madeira is the usual reading; a dry white wine works but wants a minute of cooking to lose its rawness.
- Fresh mushrooms in No. 2One cup chopped raw mushrooms sheds a lot of water. Sauté until the liquid has gone and the pan starts to sizzle again before the sauce goes in, or the finished sauce will be thin and grey.
- Order of additionsThe lemon juice, Worcestershire and wine go in at the end for a reason — ten minutes of simmering would blunt all three. Add them off the heat and taste before adding salt, since Worcestershire and mushroom catsup are both salty.
- YieldEach version makes a scant 1¼ cups, enough for four servings over steak, chicken, veal cutlets or boiled vegetables.
Lowney's, a Boston chocolate company, published its cook book to sell cocoa, but like other house books of the era it broadened out into a fuller domestic manual — hence a chapter of meat sauces in a chocolate book. Both sauces here reflect the American simplification of French practice associated with the Boston cooking-school tradition: make a roux-based brown or white sauce in quantity, then flavour a cupful at a time into whatever the meal requires. The supporting cast is turn-of-the-century pantry: canned mushrooms, then a modern convenience; Kitchen Bouquet, a bottled browning that dates from the later nineteenth century and is still on shelves; Worcestershire; and mushroom catsup, which in Britain and America predated the tomato version and was made by salting mushrooms down, draining the black liquor and boiling it with spice. Its disappearance from grocers is the main reason No. 2 reads oddly today.