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Mushrooms and Bacon
Cleanse the mushrooms thoroughly. Fry the bacon very gently. When it is almost done enough put in the mushrooms, and fry them also. Lift the bacon on to a hot dish as soon as it is sufficiently cooked. Sprinkle pepper and salt on the mushrooms, and place them in the centre of the dish. Serve very hot.
A breakfast dish stripped to essentials: the recipe gives no quantities, no pan size and no times, on the assumption that anyone reading it had fried bacon before. The points below fill in what a modern cook needs.
- The hinge: bacon fat, not butterThe whole point is that the mushrooms cook in the rendered bacon fat and take up its salt and smoke. Start the bacon in a cold or barely warm pan so the fat renders out slowly rather than searing shut; if your bacon is lean, you may need a little extra fat before the mushrooms go in.
- QuantitiesFor two people, allow about 4 rashers of bacon and 8 oz (225 g) of mushrooms. The book gives none; recipes of this kind generally left the amount to be judged by eye.
- Cleaning mushrooms"Cleanse thoroughly" in Victorian practice commonly meant peeling the caps and trimming the stalks of field mushrooms, which came in gritty. Cultivated mushrooms need only a wipe with a damp cloth or a brief rinse and a thorough dry — wet mushrooms steam instead of browning.
- TimingBacon takes roughly 6–10 minutes over gentle heat; mushrooms want 5–8 minutes over a somewhat brisker one. Adding the mushrooms "when the bacon is almost done" is right, but expect to raise the heat once the bacon comes out, or they will stew in their own liquid.
- Crowd the pan and it failsMushrooms release a great deal of water. Use a wide pan and cook in two batches if necessary; wait for the liquid to evaporate before looking for colour.
- SeasoningSalt at the end, as written, and lightly — the bacon fat is already salty. Salting mushrooms at the start draws the water out early.
- ServingServes two as a breakfast or light supper dish. Hot plates matter here; bacon fat congeals quickly, and the recipe's insistence on "very hot" is not decoration.
Cassell's belonged to a generation of large household dictionaries aimed at middle-class kitchens where breakfast was a cooked, sideboard affair, and mushrooms and bacon sits squarely in that tradition alongside kidneys, kedgeree and devilled bones. Field mushrooms were a seasonal windfall in late summer and autumn in Britain, often gathered from pasture rather than bought — commercial mushroom growing existed but was on a small scale — which may account for the instruction to cleanse them thoroughly. The recipe places the mushrooms in the centre of the dish, with the bacon lifted out first, suggesting the period's habit of composing even a plain fry-up on the dish rather than tipping it out of the pan.