Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Garnish, Mushrooms For
Cut away the gritty end of the stalk, and pare the mushrooms. Throw them as they are done into a basin of cold water; wash them well, lift them out of the water with both hands, so as to leave the sediment at the bottom, and put them in a saucepan, with the juice of a large lemon, two table-spoonfuls of water, two ounces of fresh butter, a pinch of salt, and a little pepper. Shake the saucepan constantly, and let them boil for ten minutes. They may be put into a jar, and closely covered, and will keep for some time. Probable cost, 1s. per pint.
Two separate things are going on here: a short lemon-butter stew of mushrooms for garnishing meat or fish, and an instruction to jar them and keep them. The second is the reason this page carries a warning.
- The jar is the problemMushrooms are a low-acid food, and buttered mushrooms in a closely covered jar are close to an ideal environment for Clostridium botulinum, which grows without oxygen and produces toxin without any smell or bubbling to warn you. Ten minutes at a simmer kills vegetative bacteria but not the spores.
- The lemon does not make it safeThe juice of one lemon spread through a saucepan of mushrooms and butter is nowhere near enough to bring the whole mass below pH 4.6, and the recipe gives no measured acid, no headspace, no processing time and no temperature. Nothing here can be adjusted into a sound preserving method; use current USDA guidance if you want to put up mushrooms.
- "Keep for some time" meant a cold larder"Keep for some time" is vague -- The phrase gives no period at all, and nothing in the recipe supports treating the jar as shelf-stable, which is how a modern reader is likely to take the word "jar".
- Paring is obsoletePeriod books routinely told cooks to peel mushrooms, and this one says to pare them, which suits the coarser skins of gathered field mushrooms. Cultivated button and chestnut mushrooms need only a wipe.
- Washing in a basinThe instruction to lift them out with both hands rather than pour them off is sound and still worth following with any gritty wild mushroom, cultivated or foraged: the sand settles and stays behind.
- Ten minutes is a long boilBy period standards this produced a soft, thoroughly cooked garnish. Modern palates find mushrooms held that long in liquid slack and grey.
- Costs and quantities"1s. per pint" is a shilling for a pint measure of prepared mushrooms, a price note for a Victorian housekeeper rather than a yield. No weight of mushrooms is given at all, so the butter, water and lemon have to be judged by eye against whatever quantity you have.
This entry sits in Cassell's among the garnishes, the small preparations kept ready to finish a joint, a fricassee or a fish. Field mushrooms were gathered in late summer and early autumn and had to be dealt with quickly, which is one reason so many nineteenth-century books turn to ketchup, powder, pickle and butter-stewed mushrooms in jars. Commercial cultivation in hotbeds and cellars existed in Britain through the nineteenth century but on a comparatively small scale. The advice to seal and keep is typical of household writing published before the bacteriology of the 1890s -- C. botulinum was identified by van Ermengem in 1895 -- had filtered into domestic practice.