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Beefsteak and Mushrooms
Mrs. Perry H. Smith.
Put in a saucepan, one ounce of butter, a small onion chopped fine, a little ground sage, and a little thyme, and put it over the fire; when hot, shake in two tablespoons of flour, and when it becomes brown, put in one gill of water, and let it boil for half an hour. Then add three tablespoons of beef stock, a little salt, a little nutmeg and one wine glass of sherry wine. Put in one can of mushrooms, and let it boil for ten minutes. Pour this over a nicely broiled beefsteak.
A browned-flour sauce of the old English school, meant to be spooned over broiled steak. The proportions as written make a paste rather than a sauce, so the liquid needs attention.
- The hinge: liquid volumeOne gill is half a cup, and half a cup of water against two tablespoons of browned flour will seize into a stiff paste long before thirty minutes are up. Add liquid in stages until the sauce coats a spoon — figure on 1 1/2 to 2 cups total — and keep it at a bare simmer, topping up as it reduces.
- Brown the roux properlyThe instruction to cook the flour "until it becomes brown" is the whole character of the sauce. Take it to the colour of a hazelnut shell over moderate heat, stirring; pale flour tastes raw and dark-scorched flour is bitter and loses thickening power.
- Old measuresA gill is 1/2 cup (4 fl oz). A wine glass in American books of this period is about 2 fl oz, roughly a quarter cup — a generous but not excessive amount of sherry for this quantity.
- "Beef stock"Three tablespoons of ordinary stock adds very little at this volume, which may suggest something more concentrated was meant, though the recipe says only "beef stock." A teaspoon of glace de viande or a good demi-glace will do the work, or simply build the sauce on beef stock instead of water and skip the addition.
- Canned mushroomsPeriod cans were generally small and packed in brine; expect somewhere in the range of a few ounces drained. Drain and rinse them, or substitute 8 oz of fresh mushrooms sliced and browned in butter first, as canned ones bring much less flavour of their own.
- Ten minutes of mushroomsCanned mushrooms are already cooked through and go slack and grey with a long boil. Two or three minutes to warm them in the sauce is enough; fresh ones should be sautéed separately and folded in at the end.
- Sherry timingAdd the sherry with enough simmering left — five minutes or so — to cook off the raw spirit edge. Dry or medium sherry suits the dish; cream sherry will make it cloying against the nutmeg.
- Seasoning restraintGround sage, thyme and nutmeg together will dominate quickly. A pinch of each is the intent; the sauce should read as beef and mushroom with a background of herbs.
- YieldEnough sauce for two large steaks or four servings. Broil the steak, rest it, and pour the sauce over at the table so the crust stays intact.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in the 1870s from recipes contributed by local women, with the proceeds directed to a charitable home, and the roll of contributors — Mrs. Perry H. Smith among them — reads as a directory of the city's commercial and railroad families. That social setting shows in the dish: sherry, nutmeg and a browned-flour sauce over broiled steak belong to the anglicised dining-room cookery that prosperous American households of the period admired, a domesticated relative of the French sauce espagnole. The most modern thing about it is the can. Commercial canning expanded sharply after the Civil War, and a tin of mushrooms on the shelf meant a cook could produce a "mushroom sauce" in February without a forager or a hothouse — which is precisely why so many recipes of the 1870s and 1880s specify "one can" as confidently as they specify a spoonful of flour.