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Mushroom Sauce
4 tablespoons butter or other 1 cup mushrooms, fresh or
1 cup mushrooms, fresh or fat canned
4 tablespoons flour
Salt and pepper
2 cups stock
Make a brown sauce of the fat, flour and stock. Add one cup mushrooms and cook until hot. If mushrooms are not very gently treated, they will become tough. Too much cooking ruins them, three or four minutes being quite sufficient for those that have been canned and five or six for fresh ones.
This sauce is used with any kind of roasted, broiled or braized meat, particularly with beef.
A plain brown sauce with mushrooms folded in at the end. The whole point of the recipe is in its warning: the mushrooms go in last and stay in only a few minutes.
- The hingeBuild and finish the brown sauce first, then add the mushrooms only to heat through — three or four minutes for canned, five or six for fresh. Longer and they squeak and toughen.
- Ingredient listThe quantities are 4 tablespoons butter or other fat, 4 tablespoons flour, 2 cups stock, 1 cup mushrooms (fresh or canned), and salt and pepper.
- Making the brown sauceThe recipe says only 'make a brown sauce of the fat, flour and stock,' which means cooking the flour in the fat until it browns before the stock goes in. That browning is what distinguishes this from a white sauce; underdone, the sauce tastes pasty.
- StockBeef or veal stock suits the intended use with roast and broiled meat. Unsalted or low-sodium stock is best here, since canned mushrooms bring their own salt.
- Fresh mushroomsThe recipe adds them straight to the sauce; if you would rather they not release water into it, slice and brown them separately in a little butter first. Canned mushrooms should be drained.
- "Other fat"'Other fat' in a book of this period would cover drippings and other rendered animal fats. Butter works but browns faster, so keep the heat lower.
- YieldAbout three cups of sauce with the mushrooms in it.
Mushroom sauce of this kind is a household reduction of the classic French sauce aux champignons, which reaches the same place by way of a brown espagnole and a long-simmered stock. American cookbooks of the early twentieth century compressed that method into a roux, stock and whatever mushrooms were to hand, and by the time this book appeared canned mushrooms were cheap and reliable enough that the recipe lists them alongside fresh as an equal alternative. The instruction to cook them barely at all is worth noting.