Important: Safety Warning

This page offers rules for telling edible mushrooms from poisonous ones. No such rules are reliable, and these identifications predate modern mycology. Deadly species closely resemble edible ones, and mistakes are regularly fatal. Never eat a wild mushroom on the strength of this text.

This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.

No. 691

Mousseron Garnishing, Princess Sauce

Garniture de Mousserons, Sauce Princesse

An eatable mushroom growing under moss, found in woods. Cook two pounds of mousserons under a cover, by placing them on a buttered dish, and seasoning with salt, pepper, and two gills of white wine; cover with a bell cover, begin to cook on the fire, then finish for twenty minutes in a moderate oven; drain and place the liquid in a pint of princess sauce (No. 528), reduce and when done to perfection, add a tablespoonful of chicken glaze (No. 398), and two ounces of butter. Roll the mousserons in the sautoire and serve.

← No. 690 Moril and Girolle Garnishing Garnishings No. 692 Mushrooms a la Delsart Garnishing →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

A Delmonico's garnish rather than a dish in itself: mushrooms braised in wine under a cover, then bound in a reduced velouté-based sauce. Everything hinges on the sauce, which is finished off the heat.

Two gills of white wineA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup. Poured over two pounds of mushrooms in a covered dish it will barely cover the bottom; that is intended, since the mushrooms give up a great deal of their own liquid.
Moderate ovenRoughly 350F; the book gives no figure. The mushrooms start on the stovetop only to get the wine moving, then go into the oven for the twenty minutes.
The bell coverA cloche, the domed metal lid set over a dish to trap steam. Foil crimped over a shallow gratin dish, or a lidded braiser, does the same job.
MousseronsThe name is usually connected with mousse, moss, though the derivation is not certain; in French kitchens it usually means the St George's mushroom (Calocybe gambosa) or the fairy-ring mushroom (Marasmius oreades). Neither is easy to find fresh outside Europe. Dried fairy-ring mushrooms are sold, or substitute fresh cremini or a mix of chanterelle and oyster mushrooms, which behave similarly under a cover.
Do not forage for theseFairy-ring mushrooms share their habit and habitat with several small white Clitocybe and Inocybe species that contain muscarine. Buy them, or use a cultivated mushroom.
Princess sauce and chicken glazeRanhofer's No. 528 is a veloute-based sauce enriched with cream; look it up directly rather than relying on this paraphrase. A good chicken veloute finished with a few spoonfuls of cream stands in for it. The chicken glaze of No. 398 is glace de volaille — chicken stock reduced to a syrup — and a heavily reduced stock gives much the same effect in a tablespoon.
The hinge: finishing the sauceReduce the mushroom liquor into the sauce until it coats a spoon, then take the pan off the heat before working in the two ounces of butter. The recipe does not specify this, but hard boiling after the butter goes in can leave the sauce greasy.
SautoireA straight-sided shallow sauté pan. Rolling the drained mushrooms in it means tossing them in the finished sauce just long enough to coat, not cooking them further.
YieldTwo pounds of mushrooms with a pint of sauce garnishes a large roast or a platter of poultry for eight to ten. Halve it if you are dressing a single chicken.

A Little History

This is No. 691 in Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled after some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York. The garnishing chapter is the clearest evidence of how that kitchen worked: nothing stands alone, and each entry cross-references a sauce and a glaze made elsewhere in the book, so a single plate might draw on three or four separate preparations. Mousseron is often said to derive from mousse, moss, and Ranhofer's one-line gloss — "an eatable mushroom growing under moss, found in woods" — was a necessary note for American readers, since the mushrooms were a French market item with no settled English name. St George's mushroom, the species most often meant, is generally traced to its appearance around 23 April in northern Europe. In a period before commercial mushroom cultivation was widespread in the United States, a garnish of wild mousserons in a cream velouté was a luxury.