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Stewed Mushrooms
Put them in a saucepan, season nicely with pepper and salt, add a spoonful of butter, and a spoonful or two of gravy from roast meat, or the , or the same quantity of good rich cream; shake them about over the fire, and as soon as they boil will be done.
A three-line stew that assumes you already know what mushrooms do in a pan. The text as printed contains a compositor's error — a phrase drops out after "gravy from roast meat, or the", and "over the fire" is set twice — so read it as: butter, seasoning, and either meat gravy or rich cream, shaken over heat until it comes to a boil.
- QuantityNo amount is given. A pound of mushrooms with 1 to 2 tablespoons of butter and 2 to 3 tablespoons of gravy or cream serves four as a side, or two on toast.
- SpoonfulIn many nineteenth-century household books an unqualified spoonful is taken as a tablespoon, though usage is not consistent. On that reading "a spoonful or two" of gravy is 1 to 2 tablespoons, which will not go far in a pan of mushrooms — err upward.
- "As soon as they boil"This is the weak point. Mushrooms shed a great deal of water; if you pull them at the first bubble you get pale mushrooms sitting in thin grey liquid. Keep them moving over medium-high heat for 8 to 10 minutes so the released water cooks off and the butter and cream come back together as a sauce.
- Which mushroomsThe recipe names no variety; field mushrooms, gathered or bought loose, are the likeliest intention for a book of this kind. Cultivated cremini or large white mushrooms behave the same way and are darker in flavour than button mushrooms. Do not substitute foraged fungi unless you have identified them yourself.
- Prep the original skipsWipe rather than soak, trim the stem ends, and either halve or quarter anything larger than a walnut so the pieces cook evenly. Peeling, which older books often called for, is unnecessary with modern cultivated mushrooms.
- Gravy or creamThe two give quite different dishes. Roast-meat gravy makes a savoury brown stew meant to accompany meat; heavy cream (at 36 percent fat or above, so it is less likely to split) makes the version to spoon over toast. Half-and-half or light cream is liable to curdle as the mushroom liquid concentrates.
- Seasoning"Season nicely" wants more salt than you expect — mushrooms absorb it — but add it early so it draws the water out, and finish with pepper off the heat.
- ServingTraditionally turned out onto buttered toast, or spooned around a roast or a beefsteak. A squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of parsley at the end is period-appropriate and welcome.
Stewed mushrooms of this kind belong to a long English tradition carried into American household books: field mushrooms, butter, and whatever liquid the kitchen already had going, cooked for a minute or two and sent to the table. That casual "gravy from roast meat" is the tell: the roast has but just come out of the oven and its drippings are sitting in a pan, the same logic that produced mushroom ketchup and mushroom powder as ways of keeping the flavour once the season passed. Commercial mushroom growing in caves and cellars was expanding in Europe and the United States through the late nineteenth century, but mushrooms were still largely seasonal and often gathered, which is part of why books of this period tend to concern themselves with telling readers how to distinguish edible field mushrooms from poisonous look-alikes. Once you had them, the cooking was assumed to be obvious.