Drain 1 can of mushrooms and heat 2 tablespoonfuls of butter. Add 6 shallots and 1 clove of garlic chopped fine, some parsley and thyme and the mushrooms. Let all fry a few minutes; then add the mushroom liquor and 2 tablespoonfuls of white wine, salt and pepper to taste. Let simmer five minutes and serve hot on slices of toast.
A quick sauté-and-simmer dish built around canned mushrooms, which in 1900 were a pantry luxury rather than a compromise. The proportions work as written, but a few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- The canPeriod tins of mushrooms came in various sizes; something in the range of a standard small supermarket can is a reasonable reading. Save the liquid; the recipe calls for it back later as "mushroom liquor."
- Fresh insteadAbout 10 oz of fresh cremini or button mushrooms substitutes cleanly. Since there is then no canning liquid, sauté them until they have released and reabsorbed their own moisture, then add 2 to 3 tablespoons of stock or water in place of the liquor.
- Six shallotsShallots of the period tended to run smaller than the largest sold today. Two or three modern shallots, finely chopped, will give roughly the intended volume; six large ones would swamp the mushrooms.
- Order of operationsSoften the shallots and garlic in the butter before the mushrooms go in, and keep the heat moderate. Garlic chopped fine will scorch and turn bitter in the time the mushrooms need to take colour.
- The hingeThe five-minute simmer is there to cook the raw edge off the wine and pull the liquor into a glossy sauce, not to cook the mushrooms. If the pan is still loose and watery, keep going until it coats a spoon — soggy toast is the only way this dish fails.
- Herbs"Some parsley and thyme" means a tablespoon of chopped parsley and the leaves from two or three thyme sprigs. Add the thyme with the shallots and the parsley at the end.
- YieldEnough for two as a light supper or four as a savoury course, on two slices of toast each. Firm white bread or sourdough holds up better than sandwich bread.
The "of all nations" books of the period assigned national labels loosely, and the Spanish claim here seems to rest largely on the garlic, which would have read as foreign in much Anglo-American cooking of the time. The dish itself is a garlicky variant of the mushrooms on toast that appeared often as a savoury, the small hot course served near the end of a formal English meal. What dates it is the can: commercial mushroom canning, in which French producers were early and prominent, made cultivated mushrooms available year-round to households with no access to fresh ones, and cookbooks of this generation reach for the can without apology.