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Fresh Mushroom Sauce
Thoroughly wash and drain twelve medium fresh mushrooms, finely slice, then place in a saucepan with an ounce butter, strain in juice of a half lemon and gently cook for six minutes, stirring once in a while. Add a tablespoon flour, stir well, then pour in a half gill milk and three-quarters gill cream. Season with a half teaspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne, mix well until it comes to a boil, then let briskly cook for six minutes, lightly mixing meanwhile. Pour in one and a half tablespoons sherry, mix well, then use as required.
A straightforward white mushroom sauce built on a quick roux, thinned with milk and cream and finished with sherry. The measurements are Edwardian but they convert cleanly.
- GillsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz) by the usual American reckoning; the imperial gill is 5 fl oz. Taking the American measure, half a gill of milk is 1/4 cup and three-quarters of a gill of cream is 6 tablespoons. Total liquid is about 5 fl oz, a generous half cup, which with a tablespoon of flour gives a sauce thick enough to coat.
- Saltspoon of cayenneA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, which is a great deal of cayenne for this quantity. Start with a pinch and adjust; the original is aiming for warmth in the background, not heat you can name.
- Washing the mushroomsTwelve medium mushrooms is roughly 8-10 oz. Wipe or briefly rinse and dry them rather than soaking; waterlogged mushrooms will not release their liquid in the first six minutes of cooking and the sauce turns watery later.
- The hinge: cook the flour outThe second six-minute simmer is not optional padding. It is what removes the raw taste of the flour and lets the starch swell fully. Keep it at a bare boil and stir, or the milk solids will catch on the pan bottom.
- Lemon juice earlyThe lemon goes in with the butter, before any dairy, so it is well diluted by the time the milk arrives. Added at the end, acid stirred into hot cream would risk curdling.
- Sherry off the heatSherry finish -- The recipe simply says to stir the sherry in at the end; adding it off the heat, or with no more than a moment's warming, preserves it best. A dry or medium sherry is right; cream sherry will push the sauce sweet.
- YieldAbout one cup, enough to sauce four portions of chicken, veal, poached eggs or toast. It thickens on standing; loosen with a spoonful of milk.
Sauces of this kind sit at the junction of the French classical repertoire and the Anglo-American cookbooks that popularised it: a mushroom sauce of a sort often traced to that tradition, simplified for a household kitchen by building the roux directly on top of the cooked mushrooms rather than starting from a separately made béchamel and a veal stock. The sherry finish is characteristic of turn-of-the-century American and English hotel cooking, where a fortified wine stirred in at the last moment stood in for the long-reduced stocks of a professional sauce station. Cultivated white mushrooms were long a comparatively expensive market item, grown in caves and cellars and sold fresh only near cities; a recipe that insists on twelve fresh caps is quietly a recipe for a well-supplied kitchen.