Home › Mushroom Sauce › Mushroom Sauce
Mushroom Sauce
300. Wash and pick a pint of young mushrooms, and rub them with salt to take off the tender skin; put them into a saucepan with a little salt, some nutmeg, a blade of mace, a pint of cream, and a good piece of butter rubbed in flour. Boil them up and stir them till done; then pour the sauce round the chickens, &c. Garnish with lemon. If you cannot get fresh mushrooms, use pickled ones done white, with a little mushroom powder added to the cream, &c. corns.
A white mushroom sauce of the older English kind: cream thickened with a butter-and-flour paste, spooned round boiled or roast chicken. It comes together in about fifteen minutes.
- The hinge: keep it whiteNothing here is browned. The mushrooms go into the pan raw with the cream, and the beurre manié is stirred in without colouring. If you sauté the mushrooms first you get a good sauce, but not this one.
- A pint of mushroomsMeasured by volume; a pint of small button mushrooms weighs somewhere in the region of 8-10 oz. Buttons are still the right choice; brown or chestnut mushrooms will darken the cream.
- "Rub them with salt to take off the tender skin"Old button mushrooms were peeled with coarse salt and a cloth. Cultivated mushrooms today need no more than a wipe; skip the peeling and salt them in the pan instead.
- Butter rubbed in flourThis is beurre manié: work about 1 oz softened butter into 1 tablespoon flour and drop it into the simmering cream in small pieces, stirring until it thickens. Adding dry flour to hot cream will give you lumps.
- A blade of maceOne dried strip of the aril around a nutmeg, warmer and gentler than ground mace. Fish it out before serving. A pinch of ground mace stands in, but use it sparingly.
- Cream and timingA pint here is most likely the English pint of 20 fl oz. The recipe says to boil them up, but a floured cream sauce can catch on the base of the pan, so a bare simmer is safer; cook until the mushrooms are tender.
- Pickled mushrooms "done white"The white pickle used clear vinegar and pale spices rather than the soy and dark spice of the brown sort, so the mushrooms stayed light. Rinse jarred white mushrooms well before use or the vinegar may curdle the cream, and add the mushroom powder (dried mushrooms ground fine) a little at a time.
- YieldA pint of cream makes a generous quantity of sauce; the recipe assumes more than one bird ("the chickens, &c.").
Cream sauces bound with butter and flour and scented with mace and nutmeg run right through eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery, and this one belongs to the tradition of dressing a boiled fowl in something pale and rich rather than a brown gravy. The instruction to peel mushrooms with salt reflects the trade of the time: buttons came from market gardens and dung beds, often bruised and grubby by the time they reached the kitchen, and the skin was thought coarse. The fallback to pickled mushrooms and mushroom powder is a reminder that fresh mushrooms were seasonal and unreliable, while bottled ketchups, powders and pickles were common store-cupboard items. "Done white" distinguishes the pale pickle, made with clear vinegar and pale spices, from the darker sort steeped in dark spice and soy, which would have muddied a white sauce.