No. 505

Mushroom Sauce

Sauce aux Champignons

Turn and wash half a pound of small mushroom heads (No. 118); put them into a saucepan with the juice of a lemon, and a piece of butter the size of a walnut, some salt and a gill of water. When they are cooked, after three minutes, drain, and put the liquid back into a saucepan with a pint of veloute (No. 415) or espagnole (No. 414), either fat or lean according to its requirements, then reduce and despumate the sauce. Just when ready to serve incorporate into it two ounces of butter and the cooked mushrooms.

← No. 504 Sauce a la Mornay Hot Sauces No. 506 Mussel Sauce →

For the Modern Kitchen

A classic compound sauce built on one of Ranhofer's mother sauces, so the work is really in the base; the mushroom step takes three minutes. Nothing here is difficult once the vocabulary is decoded.

GillA gill is half a cup. Half a pound of small caps needs no more liquid than that, since they release their own.
"Turn and wash"Turning (tourner) means paring the caps into smooth fluted domes with a small knife, a purely decorative cut. Skip it and use whole small button mushrooms, or quarter larger ones; the sauce is unaffected.
Velouté or espagnoleVelouté is a white stock thickened with pale roux; espagnole is a brown stock thickened with brown roux, often with tomato. Either must be made in advance -- this recipe assumes a pint of finished mother sauce already on hand. A good reduced brown or light stock-based sauce stands in.
"Fat or lean"Ranhofer means whether the base was built on meat stock (gras) or on fish or vegetable stock for fast days (maigre). Choose according to what the sauce will be served with.
DespumateTo skim: as the sauce reduces, take off the scum and fat that rise, repeatedly, with a ladle. This is what gives the finished sauce its gloss and clean flavor, and it cannot be rushed with a strainer at the end.
The hinge -- the final butterThe recipe adds the two ounces of butter only at the moment of serving; conventional practice is to whisk it in off the heat, a piece at a time, and not to let the sauce boil afterward, or it can turn greasy. The mushrooms go in at the same moment so they only warm through.
Three minutes means three minutesThe mushrooms are cooked briefly in lemon, butter and water, then drained -- long stewing makes them shrunken and leathery. Their cooking liquid goes into the sauce, which is where their flavor ends up.
YieldAbout a pint of finished sauce, enough for six to eight servings. It suits poached chicken, veal, sweetbreads, beef fillet, or eggs, depending on which base you used.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef of Delmonico's in New York, and it is organized like a professional kitchen rather than a household book: the small sauces, of which this is one, are numbered and cross-referenced back to the mother sauces and garnishes they depend on, so that a cook could be sent to No. 415 for the velouté and No. 118 for the mushrooms. The system is essentially the one Carême codified earlier in the century and Escoffier would streamline a few years later. The words carry that professional origin -- despumate, from the Latin for removing scum, and turned mushrooms, a knife cut whose only purpose is to look like restaurant food. Cultivated button mushrooms were by then grown commercially in caves and cellars around Paris and, on a smaller scale, in the United States, which is why a chef could call for half a pound of uniform small heads without comment.