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Mushroom Toast
Stew over a gentle fire a quart of nicely-prepared mushrooms (just opened), first dissolving three ounces of butter in the stewpan, and seasoning the mushrooms with white pepper or cayenne, a salt-spoonful of mace, powdered; stir them carefully, and toss them in the pan to prevent burning, and until the butter is dried and slightly brown, when add half a pint of thin cream, the grated rind of half a lemon, and a little salt, and stew until the mushrooms are tender. Beef-gravy may be substituted for the cream, and the grated lemon-peel omitted. Serve on buttered bread, fried or grilled, which should be thick enough to allow of the inside being scooped out. Serve hot, and squeeze the juice of a lemon over. Time, fifteen minutes to stew in butter; five minutes in gravy.
A Victorian savoury that still works, provided the mushrooms are cooked hard enough in the butter before any liquid goes in. Cassell's is a British book, so its pints and gills are imperial.
- The hinge: dry the pan out first"Until the butter is dried and slightly brown" means the mushrooms must give up their water and begin to fry in the fat before the cream goes in. Rush this and you get grey mushrooms in a thin, watery sauce rather than a concentrated one.
- A quart of mushroomsThis is a volume, not a weight: roughly 1 lb / 450 g of whole mushrooms, which will cook down to about a third of that. "Just opened" means caps that have flattened enough to show the gills but are not yet dark and papery.
- Half a pint of thin creamAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1 1/4 US cups. "Thin cream" is what would now be sold as single cream, around 18 per cent fat; in the US half-and-half (10-18 per cent) is the nearest equivalent. Double or heavy cream will make the dish cloying.
- Salt-spoonful of maceA salt-spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon. Ground mace loses its scent quickly; if the jar in the cupboard is old, it will contribute nothing. Grating a little fresh nutmeg is the nearest substitute in character.
- Lemon rind and creamAcid and dairy over direct heat can split. Keep the pan at a bare simmer once the cream is in, and add the lemon juice only at the table, as the recipe directs — not in the pan.
- The toastCut the bread at least an inch thick and hollow out the crumb to make a shallow case, so the mushrooms and their sauce sit in it rather than sliding off. Fry the cases in butter or grill and butter them heavily; dry toast collapses under the sauce.
- TimingsFifteen minutes in the butter is realistic for a quart of mushrooms — that is how long it takes to drive off the liquor. Allow another five to eight minutes of gentle stewing after the cream goes in.
- The gravy variant"Beef-gravy" here means proper reduced meat stock, not a flour-thickened brown sauce. A well-reduced beef stock gives a darker, sharper version; the recipe simply directs that the grated lemon-peel be omitted.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; the quantities would plausibly serve about four as a savoury or first course, or two as a supper dish.
- If the mushrooms are wildDo not substitute foraged fungi unless they have been identified with certainty; cultivated chestnut or portobello mushrooms give a close result.
Mushroom toast belongs to the Victorian savoury — the small, hot, usually salty dish served after the sweets and before the dessert fruit, chiefly at dinners where the gentlemen stayed at table. The recipe is really a lesson in handling mushrooms: cook them in butter until their own water has gone and the fat browns, and only then introduce liquid. The mace and lemon rind are conservative eighteenth-century seasonings for fungi, still standard in nineteenth-century English kitchens, and the alternative of beef gravy for cream suits a household that would have had a stockpot going regardless. Field mushrooms were a seasonal windfall rather than a shop purchase for much of the book's readership; commercial mushroom growing in England is generally traced to the market gardens and disused workings around London in the nineteenth century, but late-summer gathering remained a usual source.