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Brown Mushroom Sauce II
1 can mushrooms 1/4 cup flour 1/4 cup butter 2 cups Consommé or Brown ½ tablespoon lemon juice
This is a bare ingredient list — Farmer's book expected you to carry the method down from the preceding brown sauce entry, browning the butter and flour together, adding the hot stock, then the drained mushrooms and lemon juice at the end. A few of the quantities and ingredients need translating.
- The hinge: brown the roux properlyEqual parts butter and flour (a quarter cup of each here) cooked until the flour smells nutty and darkens is what makes this a brown sauce rather than a pale gravy. Some brown-sauce methods brown the butter first and then stir in the flour; either order works, but stop short of bitterness.
- "1 can mushrooms"The page does not say what size, and period cans of mushrooms came in more than one. A modern 8 oz can of pieces and stems (about 4 oz drained) is a reasonable stand-in; 8 oz of fresh mushrooms sliced and sautéed in a little extra butter gives a much better sauce.
- Consommé or brown stockConsommé here means a clarified, well-seasoned beef broth of the kind the book has you make yourself. Use 2 cups of good beef or veal stock and hold back on salt until the sauce has reduced, since a flour-thickened sauce concentrates seasoning quickly.
- Lemon juice goes in lastThe acid is there to lift a heavy roux-based sauce. Added at the start it dulls with cooking and can thin the thickening slightly; stir it in off the heat.
- Consistency and cooking timeTwo cups of liquid to a quarter cup each of butter and flour gives a medium sauce that will coat a spoon. Simmer it gently for at least 10 minutes after it thickens to cook out the raw flour taste.
- YieldAbout two cups of sauce, plus the mushrooms.
Brown mushroom sauce is a domesticated descendant of the French sauce espagnole and its mushroom-scented offshoots, reduced here to something a household cook could manage in a single saucepan with a can opener. That can is the tell: canned mushrooms were reaching American groceries in the closing decades of the nineteenth century — though much of the supply was still imported and something of an extravagance, with domestic commercial cultivation only getting going in the 1890s — and Fannie Farmer's book, written for the Boston Cooking School's students, treats them as an ordinary pantry staple rather than a luxury. The book's sauce chapter numbers its variants (I, II, III), which share a single set of instructions given once and then assumed.