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Mushroom Sauce
4 tablespoons butter or other fat 4 tablespoons flour 2 cups stock 1 cup mushrooms, fresh or canned Salt and pepper Make a brown sauce of the fat, flour and stock. Add one cup mushrooms and cook until hot. If mushrooms are not very gently treated, they will become tough. Too much cooking ruins them, three or four minutes being quite sufficient for those that have been canned and five or six for fresh ones. This sauce is used with any kind of roasted, broiled or braized meat, particularly with beef.
A brown sauce (espagnole in simplified form) finished with mushrooms, from the era when a jar of canned mushrooms was the more common option. The recipe's own warning about overcooking is the point worth keeping.
- Brown the roux, not just the flour"Make a brown sauce" means cooking the butter and flour together over medium heat until the roux smells nutty and turns the color of peanut butter, five to eight minutes, before the stock goes in. Skip that and you get pale gravy with a raw-flour edge.
- Add stock hot and off the boilWhisk warm stock into the roux a little at a time, then simmer 10 to 15 minutes to cook out any floury taste. Four tablespoons flour to two cups liquid gives a sauce that coats a spoon rather than a thick gravy.
- Mushroom timing is the hingeThe three-to-four minutes for canned and five-to-six for fresh is sound advice and the reason the recipe exists in this form. Fresh mushrooms will release liquid in that time, which thins the sauce slightly; if you want them browned, sear them separately in butter and fold them in at the end.
- Canned mushroomsDrain and rinse them, since the packing liquid is salty and tinny. A cup of drained canned mushrooms is roughly one 8 oz can. Fresh, a cup sliced is about 3 oz, which is modest for this quantity of sauce; 6 to 8 oz is closer to modern expectations.
- StockBeef stock suits the intended use with roasts and broiled meat. Unsalted or low-sodium stock is safer here because the sauce reduces; season at the end, after the mushrooms have gone in.
- "Other fat"This would have meant beef drippings, bacon fat or a vegetable shortening. Drippings from whatever roast the sauce is accompanying are the best of these choices.
- YieldAbout two and a half cups, enough for six to eight servings alongside meat.