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Brown Mushroom Sauce (Tablespoons butter Few drops)
3 tablespoons butter Few drops onion juice 3½ tablespoons flour 1 cup cream 1/2 lb. mushrooms 1 teaspoon beef extract
This is an ingredient list rather than a method — Farmer's book assumes you already know how to build a brown sauce, and the entry sits among other sauces that spell the technique out. The quantities as printed also carry an obvious typesetting error.
- The flour measureThe printed page was checked: the sauce takes 3½ tablespoons flour, which is what the text now gives. That is in keeping with the 3 tablespoons butter and one cup of cream.
- Brown the roux, not just the mushroomsThe word "brown" is doing the work here. Cook the butter and flour together over moderate heat until it smells nutty and turns the colour of peanut shells before any liquid goes in; a pale roux gives a beige sauce with none of the depth the beef extract is meant to reinforce.
- Beef extractThis means the thick, near-black concentrate sold as Bovril or, in the US, a bouillon paste such as Better Than Bouillon — not a bouillon cube and not stock. A teaspoon is potent and salty, so hold back on additional salt until the sauce is finished.
- Onion juiceGrate half a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve. A few drops means a few drops: it is there for aroma, not onion flavour.
- CreamTurn-of-the-century "cream" was generally thinner than modern heavy cream, nearer today's light cream at roughly 18 to 20 percent fat. Light cream (or heavy cream let down with a little milk) gives the intended consistency.
- The mushroomsHalf a pound of button or cremini, sliced and sautéed hard in a separate pan until the water has driven off and the edges colour, then stirred in at the end. Simmering raw mushrooms in the sauce leaches liquid into it and leaves them grey.
- YieldRoughly a cup and a half of finished sauce with the mushrooms in, enough for about four servings over beefsteak, sweetbreads, timbales or toast.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (first published 1896) is famous for standardising level measurements, but this entry shows the other half of its method: sauces are treated as a small family of formulas built on a butter-and-flour roux, varied by liquid and seasoning, so the compiler could give a bare ingredient list and trust the reader to recall the technique from the chapter on sauces. The teaspoon of beef extract helps date the page — concentrated meat extracts, industrialised in the mid-nineteenth century on the model developed by the chemist Justus von Liebig, were widely advertised and sold in America by the 1890s as a shortcut around long-simmered stocks. Cultivated mushrooms were still relatively expensive in the United States at the time, grown under cover near the eastern cities, which is part of why half a pound of them turns a plain brown sauce into something more substantial.