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Mushroom White Sauce
Chop off the stems, peel and wash half a pound of mushrooms, cut in half, and put in a pan with a pint of water. Add half a blade of beaten mace, a little lemon-peel and grated nutmeg, cover over the pan and stew for thirty minutes. Beat up the yolks of two eggs with a cupful of cream, and a little butter rolled in flour, and salt and pepper to taste. Stir the mushrooms until it is quite smooth, pour in the cream mixture and stir until the whole boils. Take out the lemon peel, and add half a lemon.
A late-Victorian velouté-style sauce thickened twice over, once with flour and again with egg yolk. The instructions are compressed and one of them will curdle the sauce if followed literally.
- The yolks and the boilThe recipe says to stir until the whole boils, but egg yolks set at around 160-180F and will scramble at a rolling boil. Temper the yolk-and-cream mixture with a ladle of the hot liquor first, then return it to the pan and hold it just below a simmer until it coats a spoon.
- Blade of maceMace is the dried aril of the nutmeg, sold in flat orange-brown pieces called blades. Half a blade is somewhere in the region of an eighth to a quarter teaspoon of ground mace, though ground mace cannot be fished back out the way a whole blade can.
- Butter rolled in flourThis is beurre manié: equal weights of soft butter and flour kneaded to a paste. About 1 tablespoon of each suits this quantity. Whisk it in in small pinches so it disperses rather than lumps.
- Peeling mushroomsCultivated white mushrooms today have thin, clean skins and need only wiping. The instruction reflects field mushrooms sold with soil and coarse cuticle attached.
- A pint of water for half a poundThat is a lot of liquid, and thirty minutes uncovered would reduce it considerably; the recipe covers the pan, so it will not. Expect a thin mushroom liquor and either reduce it hard before enriching or accept a pouring sauce rather than a coating one.
- Lemon peel, then half a lemonThe peel is a flavouring to be removed; the half lemon at the end means its juice, added off the heat. Acid added to a hot dairy sauce can split it, so add it last and taste as you go.
- YieldA pint of water plus a cupful of cream, with little reduction under a covered pan, comes to something like 3 cups; enough to sauce chicken, veal or fish for four to six.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 collection catalogues the standing repertoire of a large American hotel kitchen, and this is one of the workhorse sauces of that repertoire: a white sauce enriched with yolks and cream, in the family the French called allemande or sauce poulette when mushrooms were involved. The sauce is thickened twice, flour first and egg later. Mace and nutmeg in a white sauce look odd now but were entirely conventional in nineteenth-century English and American cookery, carried over from the older tradition of spicing dairy and white meat dishes. Cultivated mushrooms were becoming commercially available in the United States around this period, and a hotel could put half a pound of them into a single sauce as a matter of routine.