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Mushroom Sauce
This sauce is a very popular one for any kind of roasted, broiled or braised meat, being particularly favored for beef. One can of French mushrooms; one tablespoon of flour; two cups of stock; four tablespoons of butter; salt and pepper to taste. Heat the butter, add the flour, and stir until of a very darkbrown hue. Gradually add the stock, and when it boils, pour in the liquor from the mushrooms. Season with salt and pepper, and simmer gently for twenty minutes, skimming off any fat that rises. Add the mushrooms, cook for four minutes, and serve. mushrooms are not very gently treated they will quickly become tough. Too much cooking ruins them, three or four minutes being quite sufficient.
If
A brown-roux sauce built on canned mushroom liquor — straightforward once you read past the printer's scramble at the end, where a sentence has been split and set out of order. It should read: "If mushrooms are not very gently treated they will quickly become tough. Too much cooking ruins them, three or four minutes being quite sufficient."
- The hinge: four minutes, no moreEverything else here is patient — twenty minutes of simmering — but the mushrooms go in at the very end and stay only long enough to heat through. Canned mushrooms are already cooked; a longer stay turns them squeaky and rubbery.
- A can of French mushroomsThis meant small whole or sliced button mushrooms packed in brine, a common imported tinned good of the period. A modern 8 oz can, drained, is a reasonable equivalent — and keep the liquid, since the recipe depends on it for flavor.
- If you use fresh mushrooms insteadThere is no mushroom liquor to pour in, so the sauce loses its backbone. Sauté 8 oz sliced mushrooms in a little of the butter first, then deglaze the pan with a splash of stock or dry sherry and add that liquid where the recipe calls for the liquor.
- Very dark brown rouxFour tablespoons butter to one tablespoon flour is a fat-heavy roux, which may be part of why the recipe has you skim fat later. Cook it over medium-low heat, stirring, until it smells nutty and takes a deep brown colour; pushed past that it turns bitter and loses thickening power.
- StockBeef stock, given the intended use. Unsalted or low-sodium is best — the mushroom brine carries a fair amount of salt, so season only after the liquor has gone in.
- ConsistencyOne tablespoon of flour to two cups of liquid gives a thin, gravy-like sauce that reduces during the twenty-minute simmer. Expect a pourable coating consistency rather than anything that mounds on a spoon.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; two cups of stock plus the mushroom liquor will reduce over the twenty minutes to somewhat less than that.
Canned mushrooms labeled "French" were a marker of quality in American cooking around 1900: France dominated commercial mushroom cultivation through the nineteenth century, growing buttons in disused quarry tunnels outside Paris — customarily said to be the origin of the name champignon de Paris — and exported them tinned. Domestic American mushroom growing was only beginning to establish itself in southeastern Pennsylvania in this period, so a cook reaching for mushrooms in December reached for a tin, and the brine in that tin was treated as an ingredient in its own right rather than something to be poured away. The sauce itself is a bare brown-roux gravy, reduced to what a general-purpose household book expected of its readers: brown the flour in butter, wet it with stock, simmer and skim. That the recipe interrupts itself to warn against overcooking the mushrooms tells you the mistake was a common one.