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Pepper (Tablespoons Sauterne Chop)
2 tablespoons Sauterne Chop mushrooms, add to White Stock with onion, cook twenty minutes, and rub through a sieve. Reheat, bind with butter and flour cooked together, then add cream and salt and pepper to taste. Just before serving add wine.
This entry has come down to us truncated — the ingredient list has collapsed into the first line, so the amounts for mushrooms, stock, onion and cream are lost. What survives is a complete method for a cream of mushroom soup, and the proportions are recoverable from standard practice of the period.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the 2 tablespoons of Sauterne survived the printing. A cream soup of this pattern would take something on the order of a pound of mushrooms and a small onion to a quart of White Stock, finished with cream; that is a reconstruction from general period practice, not what the book says, and the exact figures are unrecoverable.
- White StockIn this book that means a pale stock from veal knuckle or fowl, simmered without browning the bones or vegetables. A light, unsalted chicken stock is the nearest modern equivalent; avoid dark commercial beef broth, which will muddy both colour and flavour.
- SauterneIn American usage of the period 'Sauterne' was a generic name for white wine rather than the sweet Sauternes of Bordeaux, though bottlings sold under it ranged from dry to distinctly sweet. Two tablespoons is a seasoning, not a flavour base -- a dry white vermouth or an unoaked white wine does similar work.
- Bind with butter and flour cooked togetherThis is a white roux, cooked a minute or two without colouring, then whisked into the hot sieved soup. Figure 2 tablespoons each butter and flour per quart for a soup that coats a spoon without turning to paste.
- Rub through a sieveThe original means working the cooked mushrooms through a fine sieve with a spoon, one of the few pureeing methods in a period kitchen. A blender or stick blender does it in seconds; pass it through a sieve afterwards if you want a smoother texture.
- Twenty minutesThat is ample for mushrooms and onion in stock and is worth keeping — it is what draws the mushroom flavour into the liquid. Reheating after sieving should be gentle once the cream is in; a hard boil will break it.
- Wine last, off the heatThe instruction to add the wine just before serving is the hinge. Boiled, the two tablespoons lose their aroma and leave only acid; stirred in at the end they lift the whole soup.
- YieldBuilt on a quart of stock, this serves four as a first course. It thickens as it stands, so hold back a little stock to loosen it on reheating.
Cream soups of this pattern -- a vegetable cooked in pale stock, sieved, bound with a white roux and finished with cream -- were a mainstay of the soup chapters of American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s, taught as a single repeatable formula with the vegetable swapped out. Cultivated mushrooms were still a comparative luxury in the United States at the time, grown indoors by a small number of specialist growers, which may be why a mushroom soup here gets a spoonful of wine and a finish of cream rather than being treated as everyday fare. "Sauterne" was one of several European place-names used loosely on American labels of the period, applied to domestic white wine from California as well as to imported bottles.