🔗I was introduced to this recipe by Teresina. It originally came from Elizabeth David’s Italian Food (p.82), but I have adapted it here for the modern kitchen, because finely shredding even ¾lb of mushrooms by hand takes longer than most people have time for these days.
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Peel and destalk the mushrooms if needed, otherwise just clean them up. Then either chop them very finely by hand, or use a coarse cheese grater, or put them through the coarse shredder blade of your food processor. It doesn’t matter too much if they’re a bit coarser than you want at this stage, or if the shreds are too long, as we’ll reprocess them after cooking. (see tip)
Melt the unsalted butter in a big pan and add the mushrooms, moving them around to mix them well. Put on the lid, or cover with a plate, and let it cook for about 10–15 minutes. They will exude water, so they’ll effectively stew in their own juice for a while, which cooks them.
Remove the lid, add the garlic, mix well, and continue cooking until the water is evaporated, so you end up frying the mushrooms lightly in the unsalted butter.
Add the parsley, salt, white pepper, and Marsala, and stir well. Set aside.
Heat the milk with the peppercorns until nearly boiling. Strain into a jug (discard the peppercorns).
Melt the salted butter in the same pan, add the flour and stir over a low heat for half a minute until well mixed. Turn off the heat. (see tip)
Add a small splash of the milk and stir vigorously. The mixture will become almost solid as the milk and flour combine.
Add a little more milk and stir again, making sure you beat it smooth.
Repeat again and again, adding a little more milk each time, and stirring until the mixture is creamy and glossy. Nicholas Freeling says that a well-made sauce crème should be shiny.
Add the remaining milk with the salt, finely ground pepper, and nutmeg, and bring to a gentle boil for a few minutes. It should be slightly thicker than you would normally want, because it’s going to be diluted.
Pour the mushroom mixture into your blender (not a liquidiser), and add the stock. Whizz for a few seconds only, enough to chop the strands of mushroom into the right consistency: you need to keep some texture, we don’t want a purée.
Pour into the béchamel and mix well. Check for seasoning. If it’s too thick you can add extra stock or milk.
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In some countries, iodine is added to salt for public health reasons. In Ireland we are an island with a large fish and dairy component to our diet, so our salt has no iodine added, but when I mention salt, feel free to substitute whatever kind of salt your requirements dictate.
You don’t need to wash mushrooms unless you are aware of an ongoing health hazard, just brush off any soil and grit. Trim 1–2 mm off the root end of the stalks if they seem dried out. Supermarket farmed mushrooms can be rather tasteless, so try to add some field or forest mushrooms if possible. Mushrooms are 90% water, so for recipes where you fry them, you need a lot because they fry down to only 10% of what you started with.
The word means rust, from its colour when cooked for a long time. It’s left pale cream these days. The trick is to cook the butter and flour for a minute or so, then add the milk little by little, beating each time to incorporate the milk into the buttery flour. Like oil and water, butter and milk don’t usually mix, but flour acts as a liaison (joiner). Add more milk each time until it becomes sauce-like, then you can add as much more as you need to make it the consistency you want.
Ireland is on GMT (UTC), one hour behind Central European, five hours ahead of Eastern, eight hours ahead of Pacific, and 8–12 hours behind Oz/NZ, depending on location. We love to get your calls, but at 4am our time we’re likely to be asleep.
