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Mushroom Sauce
Finely mince twelve heads canned mushrooms. Place in a small saucepan with half a gill sherry, let boil for three minutes, then add one gill demi-glace; lightly mix, let boil for five minutes and serve
A compact French-style compound sauce built on demi-glace, written for a kitchen that already had a stockpot going. The measurements are small and the whole thing takes under ten minutes once the base is in hand.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of sherry is 4 tablespoons and a gill of demi-glace is 1/2 cup. That gives roughly 3/4 cup of finished sauce, enough for two to four portions of steak, chicken or veal.
- Twelve heads of mushrooms"Heads" means caps, and canned mushroom caps of the period were small — figure about 4 oz drained, or a scant cup once minced. Fresh cremini or button mushrooms work in the same weight, but they release water, so sweat them dry in a little butter before the sherry goes in.
- Demi-glace is the whole recipeEverything here depends on a properly reduced brown sauce; there is nothing else to give body or seasoning. Use a real demi-glace or a concentrated veal stock reduction. A bouillon cube and cornstarch will read as thin and salty.
- Reduce the sherry, don't just boil itThe three minutes of boiling would drive off the raw alcohol and concentrate the wine. The recipe does not say to reduce further, but letting it go until the pan is nearly dry before adding the demi-glace guards against a sharp finish.
- Sherry to useA dry or medium sherry — fino, amontillado — not cream sherry and not "cooking sherry," which is salted. Madeira or a dry Marsala substitutes cleanly.
- Don't overwork the final boilFive minutes at a bare simmer is enough to marry the two; a hard boil will break a demi-glace that has butter or marrow in it. Finish off the heat with a knob of cold butter if you want gloss.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified because the demi-glace was assumed to be seasoned. Taste at the end and correct — canned mushrooms in particular carry their own salt.
Mushroom sauce in this form is a *petite sauce* in the classical French system — a mother sauce (espagnole reduced to demi-glace) plus a garnish and a wine, the structure Escoffier codified. Its presence in a volume called *The International Cook Book* reflects how thoroughly French technique had become the professional default in American and British hotel kitchens by the early twentieth century: a cook was expected to keep demi-glace on hand and spin a dozen sauces off it in minutes. The specification of *canned* mushrooms is the period detail worth noticing. Tinned mushroom caps were a standard larder item then, valued for being uniform, pale and available year-round.