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Steak with Canned Mushrooms
Mix one tablespoon of butter with one tablespoon of flour and stir in, gradually, one half pint of brown stock. When at the boiling point, add a teaspoon of caramel, salt, pepper, a tablespoon of some standard brand of mushroom catsup and a large cup of button mushrooms. Keep this sauce hot while steak is being broiled. Place steak on large platter, pour over the mushroom sauce and garnish the dish with French fried potatoes.
A straightforward pan sauce built on a small roux, meant to be finished while the steak broils. Two of the four flavourings are period products that need translating.
- Half a pint of stockOne cup. The tablespoon each of butter and flour will thicken it to a light coating sauce; if it tightens too much while it waits, thin it with a spoonful more stock.
- Cook the roux before the liquid goes inButter and flour want a minute or two over moderate heat before the stock is added, or the sauce tastes of raw flour. Add the stock gradually, as written, and whisk.
- CaramelNot confectionery caramel but caramel colouring — sugar cooked to dark brown and let down with water, sold then as bottled browning and still available as gravy browning or Kitchen Bouquet. It is there for colour and a faint bitterness, and a teaspoon is plenty. Skip it if your stock is already dark.
- Mushroom catsupA thin, salty, near-black liquid of salted mushrooms, vinegar and spice, once a staple bottled condiment and now largely gone from shops. A tablespoon of good soy sauce plus a few drops of Worcestershire gives a similar savoury depth; some specialist makers still bottle the real thing.
- Canned button mushroomsDrain and rinse them; the packing liquid is tinny and will carry into the sauce. A large cup is roughly 4 to 5 oz drained, about what one 6.5 oz tin gives. Add them at the end and let them heat through rather than simmer, since they are already fully cooked.
- Salt lastBetween the stock, the browning and the catsup substitute, the sauce salts itself. Taste after everything is in.
- The steakBroiling here means directly under high heat or over coals — a preheated broiler on its top setting, or a very hot grill. Rest the steak a few minutes before it goes on the platter, and pour the sauce over at the table so the crust does not soften on the way.
- YieldThe sauce as given would suit two to three, which suggests a single large steak of around 1½ to 2 lb, though the recipe specifies neither.
Mushroom catsup is the key to dating this dish. Before tomato ketchup took over the word, "catsup" covered a family of thin, salty, keeping sauces made from walnuts, oysters, anchovies or mushrooms, and the mushroom version was the workhorse of nineteenth-century English and American kitchens — a bottled shortcut to the savoury depth we now reach for soy sauce or commercial stock concentrate to get. By the time The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, the household repertoire was shifting decisively toward tinned and bottled goods, and this recipe is a small monument to that moment: a sauce assembled almost entirely from things bought ready-made, with canned mushrooms standing in for fresh ones and bottled browning for the long-cooked drippings of an earlier kitchen. The garnish of French fried potatoes marks the dish as restaurant-inflected home cooking, steak frites arranged for a platter.