Home › Sauces › Mushroom Sauce
Mushroom Sauce
Dissolve one-half teaspoonful of extract of beef in one-half pint of boiling water. Fry one minced onion and one chopped carrot in a little dripping until lightly browned; pour the liquid over them, let all boil together for ten minutes and add a dessert-spoonful of mushroom catsup, skim, strain, and it is ready for the table.
A thin brown gravy built on beef extract rather than stock, finished with mushroom ketchup. It takes about fifteen minutes and yields roughly three quarters of a cup once strained, enough for small servings.
- Extract of beefThis means a concentrated meat paste of the Liebig or Bovril type, still sold in jars. Half a teaspoon in a cup of water gives a very light broth; if you use a modern bouillon cube instead, expect considerably more salt and hold off seasoning until the end.
- Half a pintAbout one cup, 240 ml if the book is American; an imperial half-pint is nearer 284 ml. Either quantity works in a sauce of this kind.
- Dessert-spoonfulTwo teaspoons, sitting between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. Mushroom ketchup is assertive and salty, so this is a deliberate amount rather than a rounding error.
- Mushroom catsupA thin, dark, unsweetened mushroom-and-salt liquid, nothing like tomato ketchup. Geo. Watkins still bottles it; failing that, a teaspoon of soy sauce plus a little dried-mushroom soaking liquid gives a comparable savoury note.
- DrippingRendered beef or bacon fat. Butter works, though it browns faster and you will want the heat a touch lower to get colour on the onion without scorching the milk solids.
- Get real colour on the vegetablesThis is the hinge. There is no roux, no roast juices and very little meat flavour, so all the depth comes from browning the onion and carrot properly — a good eight to ten minutes over medium heat, not two.
- BodyStrained, this stays deliberately thin, a jus rather than a gravy. If you want it to coat, whisk in a teaspoon of butter off the heat, or reduce it by a third before adding the ketchup.
- ServingGood with grilled or roast beef, chops, or a steak pudding, though the recipe names no dish. Add the mushroom ketchup at the end as directed; boiling it hard dulls the flavour.
Meat extract was one of the great convenience foods of the late nineteenth century: Justus von Liebig's beef extract was commercialised in the 1860s and Bovril followed in the 1880s, putting something like stock within reach of a household that had no stockpot going. That is exactly why a sauce like this appears at all — it assumes a small kitchen, no reserve of bones, and a cook who needs a brown sauce in a quarter of an hour. Mushroom ketchup belongs to an older tradition still, the English family of thin fermented condiments — walnut, oyster, anchovy, mushroom — that predate tomato ketchup by some decades and were the standard way of putting a savoury edge on gravies and made dishes. Note too that the mushrooms here are entirely notional: the sauce is named for a bottle, not for anything sliced into the pan.