Drain 1 can of mushrooms; chop 6 shallots very fine and sauté in 1 tablespoonful of butter. Add the chopped mushrooms; sprinkle with salt, pepper, some chopped parsley and 1 minced bay-leaf. Let cook ten minutes with ½ glass of sherry wine. Serve hot on slices of French toast.
April 4 — No. 4
French
A quick sauté that reads as a savoury on toast rather than a side dish. The measurements are loose in the way of 1900s American cookbooks, and two of the terms mean something other than what they look like.
- "French toast" hereThe phrase commonly meant bread dipped in egg and milk and fried, but it was also used loosely for bread simply toasted or fried in butter, and either reading suits a savoury base. Use thick slices of a plain white loaf, cut to fit the portion.
- A can of mushroomsPeriod tins varied in size, commonly somewhere in the region of 8 oz. Roughly 8 oz of fresh cremini or button mushrooms, chopped, will stand in, though they release far more liquid; cook them down before adding the wine or the mixture will be soupy.
- Half a glass of sherryA wineglassful was reckoned at about 2 fl oz in cookbooks of the era, so read this as roughly 1 fl oz, about 2 tablespoons. Use a dry sherry — fino or amontillado — since a cream sherry will make the dish sweet.
- Six shallotsShallots of the period were likely smaller than today's banana shallots. Two modern shallots, finely minced, is about the right volume.
- The minced bay leafBay does not soften in ten minutes and the fragments are sharp enough to be unpleasant. Add the leaf whole and lift it out before serving.
- Ten minutesThis is enough only if the shallots are already soft and translucent before the mushrooms go in. Sweat them gently over medium-low heat first; browned shallots turn the whole pan bitter.
- Seasoning at the endCanned mushrooms carry their own salt and tinned tang. Taste before salting, and finish with the parsley off the heat so it stays green.
- YieldEnough for four small toasts as a first course or savoury, or two as a light supper dish.
À la bordelaise names a manner of cooking associated with Bordeaux, and in classical French usage it points above all to shallots and wine: the formal restaurant version is a red-wine sauce with shallots and bone marrow, sometimes with a mushroom garnish. What appears here is the domestic shorthand, shallots and wine cooked down with mushrooms and served on fried bread. The substitution of sherry for Bordeaux suits an American household store cupboard, where sherry was a commonly kept wine, and canned mushrooms were widely enough available by this date to be used in everyday cooking. Books of the "dish for every day of the year" type were popular from the 1890s onward, and leaned on such tins to make foreign-sounding dishes achievable in a kitchen with no access to a French market.