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Mushrooms Allamande
Brush mushroom caps and sauté in butter. Put together in pairs, cover with Allamande Sauce, dip in crumbs, egg, and crumbs again, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper.
Allamande Sauce. Melt three tablespoons butter, add one-third cup flour, and pour on gradually one cup White Stock; then add one egg yolk and season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.
This is a croquette in disguise: two sautéed caps sandwiched with a stiff egg-thickened velouté, breaded and deep-fried. The recipe assumes you know the tricks of that technique and leaves them out.
- The hinge: chill before breadingFannie Farmer's sauce here is deliberately stiff — one-third cup flour to one cup stock is roughly triple the ratio of a pouring sauce, so it sets to a paste when cold. Coat the paired caps, spread them on a plate and refrigerate at least an hour until firm, or the sauce will slump out of the crumbs in the fat.
- "Allamande" is allemandeThe book's spelling is idiosyncratic; the sauce is the classic sauce allemande, a velouté finished with egg yolk and lemon. Add the yolk off the heat and do not let the sauce boil afterward, or it will curdle and go grainy.
- White stockIn this book that means a light unbrowned stock of veal, or veal and chicken, simmered with mild aromatics. Unsalted chicken stock is the practical substitute; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, since the point of the sauce is pallor.
- Mushroom capsChoose large, flat-bottomed white or cremini caps of even size so they pair up cleanly — around 2 inches across. Remove the stems, and sauté them until they have given up their water and begin to color, otherwise the liquid will steam inside the crust.
- Crumbs, egg, crumbsThe doubled crumb coat is intentional and gives the fried shell its strength. Use dry fine crumbs, not fresh, and beat the egg with a spoonful of water so it flows evenly.
- Deep fatThe period instruction was to fry until a bread cube browned in forty seconds, which corresponds to somewhere in the region of 375-390F. At that heat the croquettes need only two to three minutes — long enough to color the crust, since everything inside is already cooked.
- DrainingBrown paper was the standard kitchen blotter of 1896. A wire rack set over a sheet pan works better, since it keeps the underside crisp; paper towels will do at a pinch.
- Yield and serviceA pound of caps gives roughly a dozen pairs, enough for four as a side or a savory course. Serve them hot with lemon; they soften quickly as they sit.
Sauce allemande — "German sauce" — was one of the foundation sauces of nineteenth-century French cooking, a velouté enriched with egg yolk and sharpened with lemon, and Carême is generally credited with fixing its place in the classical repertoire. Its appearance in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book shows how thoroughly the American cooking-school movement had absorbed the French sauce system and set it to work on humbler material: here the sauce is thickened past pouring consistency and used as a binder, the same trick behind the croquettes and cutlets that fill so much of Farmer's book. Cultivated mushrooms were still something of a luxury in 1896, grown in cellars and sold in small quantities, which explains the fussy treatment — a few caps stretched into a dish by breading and frying.