Home › Soup's On! › Cream of Mushrooms
Cream of Mushrooms
1/2 POUND MUSHROOMS I SMALL ONION, MINCED 2 CUPS HOT WATER I QUART MILK 11/2 TEASPOONS SALT 1/4 TEASPOON WHITE PEPPER 1/4 CUP BUTTER, SOFTENED 1/4 CUP FLOUR 1/2 CUP CREAM Peel and chop mushrooms, add onion and water, stew 45 minutes with water kept at simmering point and pan covered. Then press through colander. Put milk in saucepan over heat, bring nearly to boiling point and add seasonings. Stir in flour and butter, rubbed to a smooth paste. Then add mushrooms and let boil up once. Whip in cream just before serving or whip cream and float on bowls of soup when served.
A straightforward cream soup built on a mushroom broth and a butter-flour paste. The old habit of peeling mushrooms and stewing them three quarters of an hour is the part worth rethinking.
- Quantities as writtenHalf a pound of mushrooms, one small minced onion, 2 cups hot water, 1 quart (4 cups) milk, 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 1/4 teaspoon white pepper, 1/4 cup each softened butter and flour, and 1/2 cup cream. That makes roughly 6 cups of finished soup, or four to six servings.
- Skip the peelingPeeling was standard when field mushrooms arrived gritty and unwashed. Cultivated button or cremini mushrooms need only a wipe or a quick rinse; trim the stem ends and chop.
- The 45-minute stewModern mushrooms give up their flavour in 15 to 20 minutes of covered simmering, and longer only flattens the aroma. If you want more depth, brown the chopped mushrooms and onion in a little of the butter first, then add the water.
- Pressing through a colanderA colander will pass only the liquid and the softest pulp. A food mill or a coarse sieve worked with the back of a ladle gets closer to the intended texture; a brief blitz with a stick blender, then a sieve, works too. Do not purée it entirely smooth or it stops being this soup.
- The butter-flour pasteRubbing equal butter and flour into a paste is beurre mani\to a hot liquid rather than a cooked roux. Add it in small pinches to the hot milk while whisking, or it will set into lumps. It needs a couple of minutes at a bare simmer to lose the raw flour taste.
- Watch the milkFour cups of milk brought "nearly to boiling" scorches easily. Keep it moving, use the heaviest pot you have, and pull it off the direct heat once the paste is in.
- Boil up once, then stopAfter the mushroom purée goes in, one rise to the boil sets the thickening. Sustained boiling with milk and flour risks curdling and a pasty finish.
- Cream at the endThe 1/2 cup of cream goes in off the heat so it does not split. The recipe's alternative, floating a spoonful of whipped cream on each bowl, works equally well.
- White pepperMost likely chosen so the soup stays pale. Black pepper can be substituted, though it tastes noticeably different and speckles the surface.
The method here is the standard American cream-soup pattern taught in cooking schools from the late nineteenth century onward -- stew a vegetable in water, sieve it, and bind it into hot milk with butter and flour -- which is why much the same directions turn up under cream of celery, cream of corn and cream of pea in book after book. The instruction to peel the mushrooms suggests a period when they were more often sold loose and dirty, or foraged, than grown in trays, and white pepper was a common choice for keeping cream soups pale.