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Buttered Mushrooms
Remove the stems from young mushrooms, and rub the tops with salt, then rinse in salted water, and dry in a cloth. Put two ounces of fresh butter into a stewpan, over a very slow fire, and when the butter is of a beautiful pale brown, put in the mushrooms, and shake the pan to keep them from burning and the butter from oiling. When tender, serve them, arranged high on the dish, with their own gravy. It is an excellent relish, and requires no sauce.
A short dish that lives or dies on the butter. The whole method is browning butter gently, then cooking the mushrooms in it fast enough that they release liquid but not so long that they stew in it.
- The hinge: butter, not oil"the butter from oiling" means the fat separating out into a greasy pool instead of staying creamy and foaming. Keep the pan moving over the low heat the recipe asks for, so the milk solids toast evenly; if the butter starts to smoke or the solids blacken, start again with fresh butter.
- Quantities and yieldTwo ounces is 4 tablespoons, roughly 55 g. The recipe gives no weight of mushrooms; 12 oz to 1 lb (350-450 g) would be a reasonable match for that much butter, enough for two as a side or savoury course, or one generously on toast.
- StewpanA stewpan is a wide, straight-sided pan with a lid, not a deep pot. Use a large skillet or saute pan: surface area matters, since crowded mushrooms steam rather than brown.
- Do not rinse them, and do not salt them firstSalting mushrooms draws water out before they hit the pan, which is the opposite of what is wanted. Cultivated mushrooms today are clean enough to wipe with a damp cloth or brush; skip the salted rinse entirely and salt at the end.
- "A very slow fire"Low to medium-low on a gas or induction hob, enough to melt and foam the butter over two or three minutes without spitting. Once the mushrooms go in you can raise it to medium.
- Timing"When tender" is 5 to 8 minutes for button or cremini caps, less for small ones. They will throw off liquid partway through; keep going until most of it has cooked back down and coats them.
- Their own gravyThe buttery mushroom liquor is the sauce, so do not drain it. Piling the mushrooms high on a warm dish and spooning the pan juices over them is the whole of the presentation.
- StemsThe discarded stems are worth keeping for stock or duxelles rather than the bin, unless they are woody or dirty at the base.
Mushrooms occupied an odd place in the Victorian kitchen: prized as a "relish" and the backbone of ketchups and powders, yet shadowed by real anxiety about misidentified wild fungi, alongside the fuss so many nineteenth-century books make over rubbing, peeling and salting the caps. Cassell's, first issued in the 1870s and reprinted in expanded form for decades, aimed at middle-class households with a cook and a coal range, and this entry belongs to the tradition of the small savoury course served after the sweet or as a supper dish on toast. The insistence that it "requires no sauce" is a quiet argument in a period when vegetables were often said to reach the table under white sauce; the technique of browning butter first, sometimes called beurre noisette in the French kitchen, does the work instead.