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Canned Mushrooms with Brown Sauce
Brown one tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan, add one large tablespoonful of flour and brown again. Add one-half cupful of the mushroom liquor and one-half a cupful of beef stock. When smooth and thick add the mushrooms and two tablespoonfuls of sherry or Madeira; season to taste and serve on toast.
A brown roux sauce built on canned mushroom liquor, meant as much for spooning over game as for serving alone on toast. The whole dish turns on how far you take the roux.
- Brown the roux properlyThe instruction to brown the butter, add flour, and brown again is the hinge. Cook the flour and butter over medium-low heat for five to eight minutes until it smells nutty and turns the color of peanut butter; stop short and the sauce tastes raw and pasty.
- Mushroom liquorThis is the packing liquid from the can, not a separate purchase. A small can may yield about the half cup the recipe calls for, though yields vary; make up any shortfall with stock. Canned mushrooms are often packed with salt, so taste before adding any.
- ProportionsOne tablespoon each of butter and flour to one cup of total liquid gives a light coating sauce. The "large tablespoonful" of flour suggests a heaped spoon, which will thicken it noticeably more; use a level spoon if you want it pourable.
- Beef stockPeriod stock was usually homemade and lightly seasoned. If you use commercial broth, choose low-sodium, or the reduction will overshoot.
- The wineAdd the sherry or Madeira at the end and let it bubble a minute so the alcohol edge cooks off. Dry (fino or amontillado) sherry and Sercial or Verdelho Madeira both work; avoid anything labeled "cooking sherry," which is salted.
- Heat the mushrooms, don't cook themCanned mushrooms are already fully cooked. Two or three minutes in the finished sauce is enough to warm them through; longer and they turn slippery and flavorless.
- Yield and servingThe cup of liquid plus mushrooms makes roughly two to three portions on toast. Use firm, well-browned toast; the sauce soaks in fast.
Canned mushrooms were one of the small luxuries that industrial canning put within reach of an ordinary household by the late nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s use them freely in sauces where fresh cultivated mushrooms would once have been a seasonal or urban-market item. A brown roux enriched with mushroom liquor and Madeira is a domestic simplification of the classic sauce espagnole family of French professional cooking, versions of which appear in American books of the period. Serving such a dish on toast was a common turn-of-the-century habit for anything in gravy.