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Mushroom Soup (One pound of mushrooms)
One pound of mushrooms required. Peel and stew them in one cupful of water (reduce to one-half cupful), boil about twenty minutes and strain. Fry the peeled mushrooms in three tablespoonfuls of butter. Remove the mushrooms and add to the butter, two tablespoonfuls of flour. To this add the hot juice of the mushrooms peel, and one pint of hot milk. Chop the mushrooms as small as peas and stir in. Season to taste just before serving, add a cupful and a half of whipped cream.
A cream of mushroom soup built the classical way: a stock from the trimmings, a butter-and-flour roux, milk, and chopped mushrooms folded back in. The recipe reads awkwardly because the mushrooms are peeled first and the peel does double duty.
- The peel is the stockThe instruction to "stew them" refers to the peelings and trimmings, not the mushrooms themselves — the fried caps are added later. Simmer the trimmings in a cup of water until reduced to half a cup, then strain and keep it hot.
- Peeling is no longer necessaryPeeling mushrooms was routine instruction in household cookbooks of this period. Modern button or cremini mushrooms need only wiping and trimming; use the stem ends and any papery bits for the reduction so nothing is wasted.
- Twenty minutes is for the trimmings onlyThe caps go into butter and cook just until they give up their water and begin to colour, five to eight minutes. Chopping them "as small as peas" after frying, rather than before, keeps them from turning to paste.
- Cook the rouxThree tablespoons butter to two tablespoons flour is a loose roux. Let it bubble a full minute before the hot liquid goes in, or the soup will taste of raw flour.
- Add liquid hot, in stagesBoth the mushroom reduction and the pint of milk should be hot when they meet the roux. Whisk in a little at a time to avoid lumps; the finished soup is thin by modern standards and is meant to be.
- The whipped creamA cup and a half of whipped cream is a garnish and a lightener, not a body of the soup. Fold it in off the heat immediately before serving, or spoon it onto each bowl — if it boils it will deflate and may break.
- Seasoning"Season to taste" means salt and white pepper, and the soup needs a firm hand with salt because milk and flour flatten mushroom flavour. A grating of nutmeg is period-appropriate.
- YieldRoughly three to three and a half cups before the cream, so three to four servings as a first course.
Cream soups of this kind — a roux, milk, and one dominant vegetable, finished with cream — were common in American cookery by the end of the nineteenth century. Cultivated mushroom growing in the United States expanded considerably in the last quarter of the 1800s, particularly around southeastern Pennsylvania, which turned mushrooms from a forager's find into something a city cook could buy by the pound; a recipe that calls for a full pound of mushrooms assumes a market supply rather than a wood. The frugality of stewing the peelings for stock is characteristic of the period's household manuals, which treated flavour trapped in trimmings as money on the floor. The finish of whipped cream, folded in at the last moment, is a lavish one.