Pare and core three good-sized baking apples; put them into a well-tinned pint saucepan, with two table-spoonfuls of cold water; cover the saucepan close, and set it on a trivet over a slow fire a couple of hours before dinner (some apples will take a long time stewing, others will be ready in a quarter of an hour): when the apples are done enough, pour off the water, let them stand a few minutes to get dry; then beat them up with a fork, with a bit of butter about as big as a nutmeg, and a tea-spoonful of powdered sugar.
N.B. Some add lemon-peel, grated, or minced fine, or boil a bit with the apples. Some are fond of apple sauce with cold pork: ask those you serve if they desire it.
Mushroom Sauce.—(No. 305.)
Pick and peel half a pint of mushrooms (the smaller the better); wash them very clean, and put them into a saucepan, with half a pint of veal gravy or milk, a little pepper and salt, and an ounce of butter rubbed with a table-spoonful of flour; stir them together, and set them over a gentle fire, to stew slowly till tender; skim and strain it.
Obs.—It will be a great improvement to this, and the two following sauces, to add to them the juice of half a dozen mushrooms, prepared the day before, by sprinkling them with salt, the same as when you make catchup; or add a large spoonful of good double mushroom catchup ([No. 439]).
See Quintessence of Mushrooms, [No. 440].
N.B. Much as we love the flavour of mushrooms, we must enter our protest against their being eaten in substance, when the morbid effects they produce too often prove them worthy of the appellations Seneca gave them, “voluptuous poison,” “lethal luxury,” &c.; and we caution those who cannot refrain from indulging their palate with the seducing relish of this deceitful fungus, to masticate it diligently.
We do not believe that mushrooms are nutritive; every one knows they are often dangerously indigestible; therefore the rational epicure will be content with extracting the flavour from them, which is obtained in the utmost perfection by the process directed in [No. 439].
Mushroom Sauce, brown.—(No. 306.)
Put the mushrooms into half a pint of beef gravy ([No. 186], or [No. 329]); thicken with flour and butter, and proceed as above.