Home › The Principles of Cookery › MUSHROOMS (a la Casse-tout)
MUSHROOMS (a la Casse-tout)
This mode of cooking mushrooms is borrowed from the French, as its name implies. Their hearth fires are particularly adapted for it. Place a baking-tin on the hot hearth, on which lay toast well buttered; cover with mushrooms, carefully cleaned, keeping the cup side uppermost, and placing upon each mushroom a bit of butter, and a seasoning of pepper and salt. Medium-sized flap mushrooms do best for this dish; they should be freshly gathered. A glass is sometimes fixed closely over the mushrooms, but for cooking mushrooms in any quantity, an earthenware cover, with a flat top, to allow of the wood-embers being placed around and on it, is used. Serve on a hot dish. Time, ten to twelve minutes.
An open-hearth dish translated easily to a modern oven, provided you keep the point of it: the mushrooms cook in their own liquor, which the toast beneath is there to catch.
- The hinge: cup side up, coveredThe gills must face upward so the juices collect in the cap and drip into the toast rather than onto the tin. Keeping the mushrooms covered traps steam and concentrated mushroom liquor, which is the whole character of the dish.
- Standing in for the hearthA hot hearth with embers banked around and heaped on an earthenware cover gives an all-round moderate heat; a hot oven with the tin covered is the nearest substitute, though the recipe gives no temperature and none can be inferred from it. Use a lidded skillet, an inverted heatproof bowl, or a sheet of foil crimped down over the tin; the old "glass fixed closely over the mushrooms" works as a cloche.
- Flap mushrooms"Flap" means a field mushroom whose cap has opened flat and whose gills have darkened, not a closed button. Large brown or portobello caps are the nearest supermarket equivalent; their deeper flavour and open gills are what the recipe assumes.
- Cleaning, not washing"Carefully cleaned" meant brushing or wiping. Soaking open-gilled mushrooms waterlogs them and dilutes the liquor the toast is meant to absorb; peeling is unnecessary with cultivated caps, though a woody stem end is worth trimming.
- The toastCut it thick and butter it generously on both sides, or it turns to paste under 10 minutes of dripping juices. One good slice per person, with two or three medium caps set on it.
- TimingTen to twelve minutes suits medium caps; very large portobellos may want 15 to 18 before the flesh gives to a knife point. The mushrooms are done when the caps hold a visible pool of dark liquid.
- Seasoning and servingSalt draws the juices out, so season as the caps go in rather than at the table. Serve at once on a heated dish, tipping any liquor from the tin over the toast; the dish collapses in flavour as it cools.
- If you gather your own"Freshly gathered" presumes a household that knew its own fields. Several dangerously toxic species resemble open-capped field mushrooms closely enough to fool a casual picker, so buy them or gather only with a reliable identification.
This is a hearth-cooked dish set down at a moment when the open fire was giving way to the closed range, and the note that French "hearth fires are particularly adapted for it" can be read as a mild lament: the method wants glowing wood embers that can be banked around and heaped on top of an earthenware cover, producing an all-round gentle heat that a closed oven does not reproduce in the same way. The recipe says only that the name implies a French origin; it does not explain it. Casse-tout translates roughly as "break-everything", and it may be a garbling or a kitchen nickname rather than a recognised French term, so it is best treated as unexplained. The large open field mushroom was much used in England in this period, when commercial cultivation was still limited; buttered toast set underneath to catch the liquor is a standing English treatment, appearing wherever a mushroom is baked or grilled rather than stewed.