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Mushroom Soup (Take a good quantity)
Take a good quantity of mushrooms, cut off the earthy end and pick and wash them; stew them with some butter, pepper and salt, in a little good stock till tender; take them out and chop them up quite small; prepare a good stock as for any other soup, and add it to the mushrooms and the liquor they have been stewed in; boil all together and serve; if white soup be desired, use the white button mushroom, and a good veal stock, adding one-half cup of whipped cream just before serving.
A method rather than a formula: the original gives no weights, no timings and no yield. The proportions below are a reasonable reading of the intent, but the technique is the point.
- "A good quantity"Genuinely unquantified. For roughly 2 quarts of stock, 1 to 1.5 lb of mushrooms gives a soup that tastes of mushroom rather than of stock; less and the flavour disappears into the broth.
- The earthy endThe gritty base of the stalk, still carrying soil or bed material. Mushrooms of the period likely reached the kitchen dirtier than today's; trim the stem base and wipe rather than soak, since submerged mushrooms take up water and stew badly -- though the recipe itself says to pick and wash them.
- Stew, then chopThe order matters. Cooking the mushrooms whole in butter and a little stock concentrates them and keeps the liquor; chopping afterwards means every bit of that liquor goes back into the pot rather than weeping out on the board.
- Don't rush the butter stageGive the mushrooms 15 to 20 minutes over moderate heat until they are limp and have thrown their juice. This is where the flavour is made; the final boiling is only assembly.
- White button mushroomsThe white variant depends on colour, not species distinction as we would draw it. Any pale cultivated mushroom works; brown caps and the black gills of large flats will turn a veal stock grey.
- The whipped creamHalf a cup, whipped and folded in off the heat just before serving, is a garnish as much as an enrichment. If the soup boils after the cream goes in, it will deflate.
- SeasoningThe recipe seasons the mushrooms with pepper and salt as they stew and leaves the stock unspecified, so taste before serving; a reduced modern stock or commercial base can carry enough salt already.
- YieldAs written, a light first-course soup for six to eight. It is a broth-style soup, not the thickened cream of mushroom that later became standard — expect body from the chopped mushrooms alone.
Mushroom soup of this kind sits between two traditions: the clear, stock-based mushroom broths of eighteenth-century cookery and the thickened, flour-bound cream soups that would dominate the twentieth century once canned condensed versions appeared. This recipe belongs to the older camp — no roux, no milk, just mushrooms, their stewing liquor and good stock, with cream folded in only for the white version. The distinction between a brown soup and a "white soup" made on veal stock runs all through nineteenth-century soup chapters and reflects a kitchen that kept several stocks going at once. Cultivated white mushrooms appear to have been obtainable to at least some cooks, which is why the book can assume a cook could choose the button variety on purpose rather than take whatever the field offered.