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White Mushroom Sauce
One pint of white sauce, one pint of rich cream, salt, pepper. Let the sauce and cream come to a boil separately. Add one can of mushrooms that have been well cooked. Mix them together and boil up once, and serve.
A rich, old-fashioned cream sauce for roast or braised game birds. The recipe assumes you already have a pint of white sauce on hand, which most kitchens of the period did.
- White sauceConventionally a basic béchamel: roughly 2 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp flour cooked together, then a pint (2 cups) of milk or light stock whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Best on the thick side here, since a pint of cream is about to thin it.
- Rich creamPeriod "rich cream" is likely closer to modern heavy cream (36% fat) than to half-and-half. A full pint against a pint of sauce gives a very rich result; halving the cream makes a lighter sauce and is less likely to break.
- Heat the cream separately, and whyHeat the cream separately -- the recipe does not say why. One likely reason: adding cold cream to a hot roux sauce drops the temperature and can make it go grainy. Scald the cream in its own pan and combine two hot liquids.
- Canned mushroomsPeriod cans varied in size; buttons were the usual form. Drained canned mushrooms work as written; if using fresh, sauté about 8 oz sliced in butter until they have given up their water and begun to brown, or they will leak liquid and thin the sauce.
- The one boil"Boil up once" means bring it just to the point of bubbling and take it off. A cream sauce held at a rolling boil will separate and the mushrooms will toughen.
- SeasoningNo quantities are given. Canned mushrooms carry salt, so season after combining. White pepper is the traditional choice so the sauce stays unspeckled.
- YieldJust over a quart of sauce as written. Cream sauces are generally best made close to serving.
Sauces built on a flour-and-butter base enriched with cream were common in American genteel cookery around the turn of the twentieth century. Commercially canned mushrooms, much of it imported French button mushrooms, became widely available in American groceries in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and cookbooks of the era use them freely. That a household book could assume both a pint of prepared white sauce and a can of mushrooms in the pantry says something about how far prepared goods had entered the turn-of-the-century kitchen.