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Brown Mushroom Sauce (Tablespoons butter slice)
Salt. 3 tablespoons butter 1 slice carrot 1 slice onion 1 tablespoon lean raw ham, finely chopped 5 tablespoons flour 1¼ cups brown stock ½ lb. mushrooms 1 cup cold water 1 teaspoon beef extract
This is the ingredient roster for a classic sauce espagnole variation: a brown roux slackened with stock, aromatics simmered in and strained out, mushrooms and their cooking liquor added at the end. The proportions tell you most of what you need to know.
- Brown the roux, not the butterFive tablespoons flour to three of butter makes a comparatively dry roux, and flour cooked to a nut-brown colour thickens less than pale flour, so more of it is wanted. Cook it over moderate heat, stirring constantly, until it smells toasted and turns the colour of a hazelnut shell. Scorched roux is bitter and cannot be rescued.
- The carrot, onion and hamA single slice each of carrot and onion is not a mistake; they are there to perfume the sauce during a slow simmer and are strained out before serving. The "lean raw ham" means uncooked cured ham of the prosciutto or country-ham type, not boiled sandwich ham. Fry it with the aromatics in the butter before the flour goes in.
- Brown stockBeef or veal bones roasted dark, then simmered — a modern unsalted beef stock or a good demi-glace diluted to stock strength will stand in. Season only at the very end, since the reduction plus the beef extract concentrates whatever salt is already present.
- Beef extractA teaspoon of the thick, near-black meat paste sold as Bovril, or a bouillon concentrate such as Better Than Bouillon. It is intensely salty; stir it in off the heat and taste before adding any further salt.
- The mushrooms and the cold waterA pound and a half is a large quantity by modern standards and gives a heavily garnished sauce rather than a smooth one. The cup of cold water is for stewing the mushrooms gently — that liquor is the point, and it should go into the sauce along with the mushrooms themselves. Fifteen to twenty minutes of quiet simmering draws the flavour out; do not brown them first if you want the pale, clean mushroom taste this sauce was built on.
- Consistency and strainingSimmer the sauce twenty to thirty minutes after the stock goes in, skimming the skin of fat and scum that rises to one side of the pan. Strain out the carrot, onion and ham before the mushrooms are added, then finish with a pat of cold butter swirled in off the heat for gloss.
- YieldA heavily garnished rather than a smooth sauce; the recipe gives no yield, and the finished volume depends largely on how far the mushrooms cook down. Good alongside beef, tongue, sweetbreads or a plain roast fowl.
Brown mushroom sauce belongs to the family of derived brown sauces that French professional cookery codified in the nineteenth century and that American cooking schools then taught to middle-class housekeepers as a mark of a properly run kitchen. The approach of such schools was often to break such sauces into a repeatable formula in fixed spoonfuls — fat, flour, liquid — so that a cook could produce them without the apprenticeship a restaurant kitchen assumed. The scrap of raw ham and the single slices of carrot and onion may well be the vestige of a full mirepoix, scaled down to what a household would keep on hand, and the teaspoon of beef extract can be read as standing in for the long-simmered glaze a professional saucier would have had ready in a stockpot. Commercial meat extracts had become cheap and widely sold by the closing decades of the century, and their appearance in a recipe like this marks the moment when a manufactured shortcut became respectable in domestic cooking.