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Stock (Salt and pepper Drain)
Salt and pepper Drain and rinse mushrooms and chop finely one-half of same. Cook five minutes with butter and lemon juice; drain; brown the butter, add flour, and when well-browned, add gradually Consommé. Cook fifteen minutes, skim, add remaining mushrooms cut in quarters or slices, and cook two minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Use fresh mushrooms in place of canned ones when possible.
A brown mushroom sauce built on a browned-butter roux and consommé, in the classic Fannie Farmer manner. The written quantities have not survived intact, so treat the method as the recipe and scale to the standard proportion for a brown sauce.
- Working proportionA brown sauce of this era commonly runs 2 tablespoons butter to 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup consomme, which yields about a cup of finished sauce. The recipe's own quantities are lost; roughly 1/2 lb fresh mushrooms would suit that quantity, but this is an editorial suggestion rather than anything the text specifies.
- The hinge is the browned butterThe butter is cooked past melting until it colors and smells nutty, then the flour is browned in it. Stop the flour at the shade of a copper penny; carried further it loses thickening power and turns bitter, and burnt specks cannot be strained out of the flavor.
- Add the consomme graduallyA browned roux thickens less readily than a pale one and lumps just as easily. Add the hot liquid in stages, whisking smooth before the next addition.
- Two batches of mushroomsHalf the mushrooms are chopped fine and stewed in butter and lemon juice, then drained; the text does not say what becomes of them, and the likely reading is that the flavoured butter is kept for the roux and the chopped mushrooms set aside or discarded. The rest go in near the end, cut in quarters or slices, for two minutes.
- ConsommeCanned or boxed beef consomme works, but it is saltier and more assertive than the homemade stock intended here. Taste before adding any salt, and dilute with water if it dominates.
- SkimmingThe fifteen-minute simmer is there so fat and scum rise and can be lifted off. Set the pan slightly off center on the burner so the simmer pushes everything to one side, which makes skimming quick.
- Canned mushroomsThe instruction to drain and rinse belongs to canned mushrooms, which came packed in heavily salted brine. Fresh mushrooms need no rinsing at all, only wiping.
- ServingIf made to the proportion suggested above, about one cup, enough to sauce roughly four portions of steak, roast beef, or broiled chicken. The recipe itself gives no yield.
Sauces like this one sit in the direct line of descent from the French sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce built on browned roux and brown stock, which American cooking schools taught as a foundational skill. Such derivatives tend to run in long sequences, each a base sauce plus one defining garnish, and they were written for households that still simmered stock as a matter of routine. The instruction to prefer fresh mushrooms over canned is a period marker in itself: cultivated mushrooms were a specialty crop, grown in cellars and caves, and the brine-packed tin appears to have been the commoner option, with American growing expanding thereafter. The closing line reads as a quiet acknowledgment that the canned product was often enough the ordinary case.