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Pepper (Cook butter with vegetables)
Cook butter with vegetables and ham until brown, add flour, and when well browned add stock, gradually, then strain. Clean mushroom stems, break in pieces, cover with water, and cook slowly until stock is reduced to one-third cup. Strain, and add to sauce with beef extract and seasonings. Just before serving add mushroom caps peeled, cut in slices lengthwise, and sautéd in butter five minutes.
This is the method half of a brown mushroom sauce; the ingredient list that belonged with it has been lost in the page break, so treat the text as technique rather than formula. The proportions below are the standard ones for a sauce of this type in the same book.
- No quantities surviveThe verbatim text names butter, vegetables, ham, flour, stock, mushrooms, beef extract and seasonings but gives no amounts. A workable brown sauce of this style runs about 4 tablespoons butter and 4 tablespoons flour to 2 cups brown stock, with a small onion, carrot and a slice or two of ham cut fine.
- The hinge is the rouxEverything depends on browning the flour properly without scorching it. Cook it in the fat over moderate heat, stirring, until it is the colour of a hazelnut shell; burnt flour turns the finished sauce bitter and also loses thickening power, so a dark roux needs more flour than a pale one.
- Add stock graduallyPour the hot stock into the browned roux in stages, beating smooth after each addition. Dumping it in at once is the usual cause of lumps that no straining will fully rescue.
- Beef extractThis means a concentrated meat paste of the Liebig or Bovril type, sold in small jars. A teaspoon is plenty for two cups of sauce; it is very salty, so season at the end rather than the beginning.
- Mushroom stem stockSimmering the trimmed stems and reducing the liquid to a third of a cup is the real flavour step. The recipe gives no timing, and how long the reduction takes depends on how much water the stems were covered with. It is not optional garnish work; without it the sauce tastes only of browned flour and extract.
- Peeling the capsCookbooks of this period routinely direct that mushrooms be peeled, as this one does. Modern button and cremini mushrooms need only a wipe; skip the peeling and lose nothing.
- Five minutes in butterSliced caps sautéed five minutes over brisk heat will just begin to colour and release their liquid. Add them at the last moment as directed, or they will go grey and limp in the hot sauce.
- Yield and useOn the reconstructed proportions above, expect roughly two cups. It is a coating sauce of the sort served with beef fillet, sweetbreads, timbales or croquettes.
What survives here is a domesticated espagnole: the classic French brown sauce built on a dark roux, a mirepoix of vegetables browned with a little ham or bacon for depth, and brown stock. American cookbooks of the turn of the century often carried the method over in simplified form, with one telling addition — commercial beef extract, the shelf-stable meat concentrate that had become widely available after Liebig's product and its imitators spread through the second half of the nineteenth century. The mushroom stem decoction puts the trimmings to use: stems too tough to slice were simmered down to an essence, a habit worth keeping.