Mushroom Soup
¼ pound mushrooms (or skin
2 tablespoons flour and stems of ½ pound)
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons butter
1 pint milk
Brush, wash and skin the mushrooms. Put the skins to simmer in a little water. Cut the mushroom caps and stems into very small pieces; add one pint of water and simmer until tender. Make a sauce of the fat, flour, salt and milk and add the water in which the mushroom caps, stems and skin were cooked. The soup is more delicious if the diced caps and stems are added.
A plain milk-based mushroom soup built on a white sauce, with a thrifty twist: the peelings do most of the flavouring. It comes together in about half an hour and serves two generously, or four as a first course.
- The quantitiesThe ingredient column has run together in this printing. Read it as roughly 1/4 lb mushrooms (or the skins and stems from 1/2 lb), 2 tablespoons flour, 2 tablespoons butter, 1 teaspoon salt and 1 pint milk. The pint of water for simmering appears in the method.
- Skinning mushroomsPeeling the caps was standard practice when field mushrooms came in with grit and a tough cuticle; cultivated white and cremini mushrooms today do not need it. If you skip the peeling, simmer a few whole mushrooms or the trimmed stem ends in the water instead to get the same infusion.
- Don't wash them longBrush the caps and rinse quickly rather than soaking. Mushrooms absorb water fast, and the soup depends on their flavour concentrating in the cooking liquid, not diluting into it.
- The hinge: the mushroom waterThe whole point of the recipe is the liquor from simmering the skins (in a little water) together with that from the caps and stems (in a pint). Reduce it a little if it tastes thin, and strain the skins out before it goes into the sauce.
- Making the sauceMelt the butter, stir in the flour and cook it a minute or two without colour, then add the milk gradually off the heat and bring it back to a simmer, whisking. Add the strained mushroom water last, and gradually, so the sauce stays smooth.
- Milk pintAn American pint here, so 2 cups. Whole milk gives the right body; a splash of cream at the end is in keeping with the period.
- SeasoningA teaspoon of salt for a quart of finished soup is modest, and about right now. Pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of sherry are all plausible additions the recipe leaves out.
- Do add the mushrooms backThe final line is not optional in any practical sense. Without the diced caps and stems the soup is a mushroom-flavoured white sauce.
Cream of mushroom soup in this form is a white sauce thinned with an infusion, the same structure that underpins most of the cream soups in American household manuals of the early twentieth century: butter, flour, milk, and whatever vegetable liquor the cook has to hand. The Butterick book, published by the pattern company as part of a broad line of domestic guidance for the home sewer and housekeeper, aimed squarely at economical cooking, and the instruction to use the skins and stems of half a pound rather than the mushrooms themselves is characteristic. Cultivated mushrooms were still a relatively costly item in this period, grown in caves and cellars and sold in small quantities, so a recipe that extracted flavour from the trimmings while the caps went to a more prominent dish made good household sense.