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Mushrooms à la Sabine (Wash one-half pound mushrooms)
Wash one-half pound mushrooms, remove stems, and peel caps. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour , and cook three minutes in a hot frying-pan, with two tablespoons butter. Add one and one-third cups Brown Sauce, and cook slowly five minutes. Sprinkle with three tablespoons grated cheese. As soon as cheese is melted, arrange mushrooms on pieces of toast, and pour over sauce.
A simple sauté-and-sauce dish that depends entirely on a component recipe the book assumes you already have on hand. Read the Brown Sauce entry first.
- Brown SauceIn this book that means a roux of butter and flour cooked to a nut brown, then whisked with brown stock and seasoned. Check the book's own Brown Sauce entry for its proportions. A good jarred demi-glace base or a reduced beef stock thickened with beurre manié stands in acceptably.
- Skip the peelingPeeling caps was standard when mushrooms came in from fields and beds with grit and a tough cuticle. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need only a wipe or a quick rinse; peeling them costs flavour and does nothing.
- Keep the stemsThe recipe discards them for the sake of a neat cap. Chop and add them to the pan, or save them for the stock that goes into the brown sauce.
- Get the pan properly hotThree minutes only works if the pan is hot enough that the mushrooms sear rather than stew. Cook in a single uncrowded layer; a half pound in a 10-inch pan is about right. If they release water, let it cook off before the sauce goes in.
- The flour dredgeDredging before frying browns the mushrooms and lightly thickens the finished sauce. Use a light hand — a heavy coat turns pasty once the brown sauce is added.
- Cheese"Grated cheese" here is most likely Parmesan or another dry aged cheese, though the recipe does not say. Add it off the heat or over very low heat; boiling it into the sauce makes it stringy and oily.
- YieldHalf a pound of mushrooms serves two as a light supper or four as a small first course. Toast should be firm and dry enough not to collapse — a sturdy white bread, cut thick.
Mushrooms on toast under a brown sauce belongs to the late-nineteenth-century American adaptation of French service, where a savoury dish set on a piece of fried or toasted bread — a croûte — could function as an entrée, a supper dish, or the savoury course that closed a formal dinner. The name here appears to be decorative rather than descriptive; Fannie Farmer's book is full of dishes given proper names whose origins are hard to trace, in the fashion of hotel and restaurant menus of the 1890s, which liked to attach a personal or place name to an otherwise plain preparation. What is significant is the mushroom itself: commercial mushroom growing in the United States expanded rapidly in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and by 1896 a cooking school could assume its students would buy half a pound at market rather than gather it. The Vegetables chapter treats mushrooms as an ingredient to be handled with care, which suggests how recent domesticated supply still was.