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Mushroom Brown Sauce
Pare and chop off the roots of half a pound of mushrooms, put in a saucepan with two cupfuls of brown gravy and the peel of half a lemon, salt and pepper to taste. Cook for thirty minutes; remove the lemon peel, and add the juice of half a lemon
A short hotel-kitchen sauce that assumes you already have brown sauce on hand. The only real work is in what Oscar leaves unsaid.
- "Brown gravy" means espagnole"Brown gravy" -- In a hotel kitchen of this period the phrase most likely meant the standing brown sauce from the range: brown roux, brown veal or beef stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered for hours. Two cupfuls of good reduced beef or veal stock thickened with a brown roux will stand in; canned or packet gravy will not, since the whole sauce is only gravy plus mushrooms.
- Quantities and yieldHalf a pound of mushrooms to two cupfuls of sauce; after thirty minutes of simmering expect somewhere around a pint of finished sauce, to serve over steak, roast beef, or veal.
- "Pare" the mushroomsPeriod mushrooms were field-gathered or hotbed-grown and often gritty, so the caps were peeled and the stem ends trimmed off. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need only wiping and the dry stem tip removed; peeling throws away flavor.
- Brown them first if you want depthThe recipe simmers raw mushrooms straight into the sauce, which gives a pale, watery mushroom flavor and drops a good deal of liquid into the pan. Sauteing the chopped mushrooms in butter until the released water cooks off, then adding the sauce, is closer to what most cooks now want.
- Thirty minutes is not too longUnlike most vegetables in old recipes, mushrooms genuinely benefit from a long simmer in a brown sauce, and the time also lets the sauce reduce and the lemon peel give up its oil. Keep it at a bare simmer, uncovered, and skim.
- Only the yellow zestPeel the lemon thinly with a swivel peeler so no white pith goes in; pith turns bitter over half an hour of cooking. Pull the peel out before the juice goes in, as instructed.
- Juice goes in off the heatThe acid is a finishing note. Add it at the very end, taste, and adjust salt after, since the lemon will make the sauce read less salty than it is.
Oscar Tschirky's The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896) came out of a large hotel establishment, and this entry shows it: a sauce that begins with two cupfuls of brown gravy assumes a stockpot and a batch of brown sauce already standing on the range, in the period when Escoffier's brigade system was organizing French kitchens around a handful of mother sauces that could be spun into derivatives quickly. A brown sauce finished with mushrooms belongs to the broad family of French mushroom-and-brown-sauce derivatives, where the mushrooms and an acid lift, wine or lemon, cut the richness of a long-reduced meat sauce. The lemon peel is the older touch: eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English cookery leaned heavily on lemon rind and lemon juice for brightness in gravies.