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MUSHROOMS (a la Creme)
Cut the mushrooms in pieces, and toss them in butter seasoned with salt over a brisk fire; add a very little nutmeg, and a bunch of herbs. When they are done enough, and the butter nearly all absorbed, take out the herbs; add the yolk of an egg beaten up in some good cream, make very hot, and serve.
A short French-style sauté with an egg-and-cream liaison at the end. The original gives no quantities, so the proportions are yours to set; what matters is the heat control in the final minute.
- The hinge: the liaison must not boilOnce the yolk-and-cream mixture goes in, keep the pan below a simmer — around 180F is the working range. "Make very hot" means hot to serve, not bubbling; a boil will scramble the yolk and break the sauce into curds and weeping butter.
- Working quantitiesFor four as a side or savoury, use about 1 lb mushrooms, 2 oz butter, 1 egg yolk and 4–5 fl oz cream. The recipe is silent on all of this, so treat these as a starting point rather than a reconstruction.
- "A brisk fire"High heat, and a wide pan. Mushrooms shed a great deal of water; crowd them and they stew grey instead of browning. Cook in two batches if the pan is small.
- "A bunch of herbs"Read it as a bouquet garni; parsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied with string is the usual make-up, though the recipe does not say what went into it. Tying rather than scattering loose herbs is implied by the instruction to "take out".
- "Done enough, and the butter nearly all absorbed"Roughly 8–10 minutes over high heat: the mushrooms release liquid, that liquid evaporates, and the pan goes quiet and glossy. That dry stage is the cue for the cream, not before.
- Cream"Good cream" here means high-fat — use double or heavy cream, 36% or above. Single cream or half-and-half has too little fat to hold with an egg yolk and is more likely to split.
- Nutmeg"A very little" is literal: a couple of scrapes from a whole nutmeg. Pre-ground nutmeg is coarser in flavour and easy to overdo in a dish this plain.
- ServingSuited to a vegetable course or a hot savoury on toast. It is not a dish that holds or reheats well: a yolk-thickened sauce is likely to break on a second heating, so serve straight from the pan.
Mushrooms à la crème is one of a family of nineteenth-century English dishes that borrowed a French name and a French finish: the liaison of egg yolk beaten into cream, stirred in off the boil to thicken a sauce without flour. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households in the later Victorian decades, is full of these — short entries that assume the cook already knows what a bouquet garni is and how far a sauce can be pushed before it curdles. The mushrooms may have been field mushrooms gathered in late summer, though commercial mushroom beds — dark sheds, caves and disused tunnels, in and around London and Paris — were well established by this period and made the cultivated button mushroom a reliable market item rather than a seasonal windfall. The book's caution about lifting out the herbs is a small tell about the intended audience: this is written for someone cooking to a standard, where a stray thyme stalk on the plate counts as a fault.