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Good (to serve with Fowls or Rabbits)
- INGREDIENTS for sauce for pair of fowls.- 1 pint of mushroom-buttons, salt to taste, a little grated nutmeg, 1 blade of pounded mace, 1/2 pint of cream, 1/2 pint of milk, 2 oz. of butter, flour to thicken. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 9d.
Rub the buttons with a piece of flannel and salt, to take off the skin; cut off the stalks and put them in a stewpan with the above ingredients, previously kneading together the butter and flour; boil the whole for about ten mintues, stirring all the time. Pour some of the sauce over the fowls and the remainder serve in a tureen.
TΙΜΕ.-10 minutes.
SEASONABLE from August to October.
Mushroom Sauce, White (to serve with Boiled Fowls, Cutlets, &c.).- INGREDIENTS.--Rather more than pint of button mushrooms, lemon-juice and water, 1 oz. of butter, pint of Béchamel, teaspoonful of pounded sugar. AVERAGE Cost, 1s.
Turn the mushrooms white by putting them into lemon-juice and water, having previously cut off the stalks and wiped them perfectly free from grit. Chop them and put them in a stewpan with the butter.
When the mushrooms are softened, add the Béchamel and simmer for about 5 TIME.-1 hour. minutes; should they, however, not be SEASONABLE. - When mushrooms are done enough, allow rather more time. They should not boil longer than necessary, plentiful, MUSHROOM SAUCE. as they would then lose their colour and flavour. Rub the whole through a tammy and serve very hot. After this, it should be warmed in a bain marie.
TIME.-Altogether hour.
SEASONABLE from August to October.
Mushroom Sauce, White (to for serve with Boiled Fowls, Cutlets, &c.; a more simple for sufficient for pair of fowls. pint of melted butter, made with milk, 1/24 pint of button mushrooms, 1 dessertspoonful of mushroom ketchup, if at hand; cayenne and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 6d.
Make the melted butter with milk and add to it the mushrooms, which must be nicely cleaned and free from grit and the stalks cut off. Let them simmer gently for about 10 minutes, or until they are quite tender. Put in the seasoning and ketchup; let it just boil, when serve.
TIME. Rather more than 10 minutes.
SEASONABLE from August to October.
Mushrooms, Baked. (A Breakfast, Luncheon, or Supper Dish.) - INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 or 5 persons.-16 to 20 mushroom-flaps, butter, pepper to taste.
AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
For this mode of cooking, the mushroomflaps are better than the buttons and should not be too large. Cut off a portion of the stalk, peel the top and wipe the mushrooms carefully with a piece of flannel and a little fine salt. Put them into a buttered tin baking-dish, with a very small pièce of butter placed on each mushroom; sprinkle over a little pepper and let them bake for about 20 minutes, or longer should the mushrooms be very large. Have ready a very hot dish, pile the mushrooms high in the centre, pour the gravy round and send them to table quickly, with very hot plates.
TIME.-20 minutes; large mushrooms hour.
SEASONABLE. -Meadow mushrooms in September and October; cultivated mushrooms may be had at any time. Mushrooms, Broiled. (A Breakfast, Luncheon, or Supper Dish.)-INGREDIENTS. Mushroom-flaps, pepper and salt to taste, butter, lemon-juice.
Cleanse the mushrooms by wiping them with a piece of flannel and a little salt; cut off a portion of the stalk and peel the tops; broil them over a clear fire, turning MUSHROOMS, TO PRESERVE. them once and arrange them on a very hot dish. Put a small piece of butter on each mushroom, season with pepper and salt, and squeeze over them a few drops of BROILED MUSHROOMS. lemon-juice. Place the dish before the fire and when the butter is melted, serve very hot and quickly. Moderate-sized flaps are better suited to this mode of cooking than the buttons; the latter are better in stews. mushrooms.
TIME.-10 minutes for medium sized SEASONABLE. - Meadow mushrooms in September and October; cultivated mushrooms may be had at any time.
Several mushroom preparations sit together here: a rich cream sauce for a pair of fowls, two white sauces, and mushrooms baked and broiled. The cream sauce and the broiled flaps are the two worth cooking as written.
- Buttons and flaps"Buttons" are small closed-cap mushrooms, roughly what a supermarket sells as button or baby chestnut. "Flaps" are fully open flat mushrooms, cap 3-4 inches across; portobellos are their modern equivalent, though rather thicker.
- Skip the flannelRubbing with flannel and salt was meant to strip the skin from field mushrooms, which came in gritty and sometimes coarse. Cultivated mushrooms need only a wipe with a damp cloth, and peeling costs you flavour.
- A pint of mushroomsThis is a volume, not a weight: a pint of buttons is about 8 oz / 225 g. The cream sauce as given makes rather more than most people want for one chicken, so halve it freely.
- Butter and flour kneadedThat is beurre manié, a paste of roughly equal weights of soft butter and flour; here it goes into the stewpan with the rest of the ingredients rather than being whisked in at the end. With 2 oz butter, work in flour a little at a time until the sauce coats a spoon.
- Ten minutes is the limitSliced or whole buttons are cooked through in well under ten minutes; the time here is really for thickening the cream. Longer and they shed water and grey the sauce, exactly the loss of colour and flavour the second sauce warns against.
- "Melted butter"In Victorian usage this is not butter melted in a pan but a plain flour-thickened white sauce - roughly 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and half a pint of milk. It is the base of the simplest version here.
- Mace, tammy, bain marieA blade of mace is one dried strip of nutmeg aril; a good pinch of ground mace substitutes. A tammy is a fine cloth or sieve for straining, and a bain marie is a water bath - a bowl over barely simmering water keeps the sauce hot without splitting it.
- Mushroom ketchupThe thin, black, salty mushroom liquor of the period, closer to a soy or Worcestershire sauce than to tomato ketchup. It is still sold; a dash of Worcestershire and a little soy does the same job.
- Baking and broilingFor the baked flaps use a 400F / 200C oven; 20 minutes suits medium caps, 30 for large ones. Broiled, they want a hot grill and a single turn, about 4-5 minutes a side, with the butter added off the heat so it does not burn.
- Wild mushroomsThe "meadow mushrooms" of September and October are field mushrooms, Agaricus campestris, and they have look-alikes that are seriously toxic. Buy cultivated mushrooms unless you can identify what you have picked with certainty.
Mrs Beeton's mushroom entries belong to the moment when the mushroom stopped being a seasonal windfall and became a shop item. The repeated note - meadow mushrooms in September and October, cultivated mushrooms at any time - marks the spread of commercial mushroom beds. The seasonings tell you the same story from the other side: mace, nutmeg and mushroom ketchup were the standard Georgian props for pushing a mild ingredient towards savouriness, and mushroom ketchup in particular was a household staple, a bottled brown liquor made by salting and pressing the flaps in autumn so the flavour lasted through the winter. The costings in shillings and pence, a Beeton signature, are also worth reading: one shilling ninepence for a sauce was not a trifle, which is why the plainer melted-butter version at sixpence is offered directly beneath it.