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Mushroom Garnishing
Mince twelve mushrooms and place them in a saucepan with half a pint of Madeira sauce. Cook for five minutes and it is ready for use.
A one-line component recipe from the Waldorf's garnish repertoire, written for a kitchen that had a pot of Madeira sauce already on the stove. Everything hinges on that sauce, which the book assumes you can produce on demand.
- Madeira sauceIn this book it means a brown sauce (espagnole or demi-glace) finished with Madeira, not wine thickened with flour. A good reduced veal or beef stock thickened lightly and seasoned with a couple of tablespoons of dry Madeira off the heat is the closest practical equivalent.
- Half a pintOne cup, 8 fl oz. American recipes of the 1890s use the 16-ounce pint, so there is no British-measure complication here.
- Twelve mushroomsGenuinely ambiguous; the book gives no size or variety. If read as ordinary trimmed button caps, that is somewhere around 8 to 12 oz of mushrooms, a good two cups once minced.
- Mince, not chopThe point of the preparation is that it disappears into the sauce and coats whatever it garnishes. Cut fine by hand or pulse briefly; a food processor run too long gives you mushroom paste and water.
- Five minutesLong enough for the mushrooms to give up their liquid into the sauce and for it to tighten again. If the sauce thins out, hold it at a bare simmer a minute or two longer rather than adding thickener.
- Yield and useComfortably more than the half pint of sauce you started with, and enough to garnish several portions. The book gives no serving instruction; a bound mushroom garnish of this kind would suit sauteed meats, sweetbreads or filled pastry cases.
- SeasoningThe original assumes the base sauce is already seasoned. Taste at the end; mushrooms absorb salt, and a further splash of Madeira added off the heat restores the aroma cooked off during the five minutes.
Oscar Tschirky spent decades as maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria, and the cook book that carries his name (1896) is essentially a working document of a large French-service hotel kitchen, which is why entries like this one are three sentences long and presuppose a stockpot, a sauce station and a garde-manger. Minced mushrooms cooked down in a rich brown sauce sit close to the classical duxelles of French kitchens, generally attributed to the seventeenth-century cook La Varenne and named for the Marquis d'Uxelles, though here the mushrooms are bound in Madeira sauce rather than reduced dry with shallot. Madeira was one of the fortifying wines used in brown sauces in American hotel cooking of the period, with sherry and sherry-type wines serving much the same purpose.