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Croute-Aux-Champignons
From a stale loaf cut the crust rather more than an inch in thickness, toast and butter it. Put a piece of butter the size of a large egg into a saucepan; let it melt, then put into it three dozen button mushrooms, first cutting off the ends of the stalks, and paring them neatly. Strew over them a little pepper and salt, and add the juice of half a lemon. Stew them gently for twenty-five minutes, shaking the pan frequently. Grate a quarter of a nutmeg over them, and add a tea-spoonful of flour mixed with a cupful of milk. Let them simmer five minutes longer, pour them over the toast, and serve hot. A little good stock may be used instead of the milk if preferred. Sufficient for five or six persons. Probable cost, mushrooms, 6d. to 2s. per pint.
A Victorian mushroom savoury served on a thick slab of toast. Almost everything here still works; the measurements just need translating.
- The croûte itself"Cut the crust rather more than an inch in thickness" means a single thick slab off the end of a stale loaf, toasted and buttered — not a modern thin slice. The stale loaf is presumably specified because it stays firm under a wet topping; fresh bread collapses.
- Three dozen buttonsThe price is quoted per pint, so the quantity is probably of roughly that order by volume; reckon on somewhere around 12 oz to 1 lb (350–450 g) of small closed-cup mushrooms today. If yours are large, quarter them rather than counting.
- Butter the size of a large eggAbout 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. This is a generous amount and it is doing the work of the sauce, so do not cut it back much.
- A cupful of milkNot a fixed measure in this period; take it as somewhere between 8 and 10 fl oz (240–280 ml). The single teaspoon of flour will only lightly bind it — expect a thin, buttery sauce rather than a gravy. Mix the flour into cold milk before it goes near the pan.
- The twenty-five minutesLonger than modern instinct, but correct here. The mushrooms first give up their liquid, then it reduces down with the butter and lemon into the concentrated base of the sauce. Keep the heat genuinely low and shake the pan as directed; a hard boil will drive off the liquid before the flavour has developed.
- A quarter of a nutmegRoughly 1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon freshly grated (a whole nutmeg yields only about 2–3 teaspoons). Whole nutmegs vary in size, so grate to taste rather than to the fraction.
- Assemble at the last momentPour over the toast only as it goes to the table. Left to stand, the butter and milk soak straight through and the point of the dish — crisp base, soft mushrooms — is lost.
- Yield and course"Sufficient for five or six persons" implies small helpings — the one slab divided between plates — which fits a savoury course rather than a main dish. As a lunch dish on individual slices of toast it will feed fewer, perhaps two or three.
- The stock variationStock instead of milk gives a darker, more savoury result. The recipe specifies only "a little good stock", but a well-reduced stock will do more for the dish than a thin broth.
Croûtes belonged to the savoury course, the small salty dish that came after the sweets at a formal English dinner in the second half of the nineteenth century — anchovy toast, devilled roes, cheese ramekins and mushrooms on toast all did duty there. The recipe can also be read as a lesson in the technique: fat, seasoning, acid, long gentle stewing, then a minimal flour-and-liquid binding at the end. The costing "6d. to 2s. per pint" is the telling detail, since mushrooms were sold by volume rather than weight; the wide price range may well reflect a supply that swung between cheap wild field mushrooms in season and more expensive forced buttons raised in the mushroom houses and hotbeds of market gardens near the cities.