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Mushrooms, Curried
Skin and wash half a pound of button mushrooms. Melt an ounce of butter in a saucepan, put the mushrooms in with a seasoning of pepper and salt, and fry for a few minutes. Add sufficient curry-sauce to just cover the mushrooms. Cook slowly for about fifteen minutes longer. Put them on slices of crisp toast placed on a dish, pour the sauce round the dish, and serve with plainly cooked rice. Probable cost, 1s.
A simple sauté that depends entirely on a curry sauce the book assumes you already have standing by. Sort that out first and the rest takes twenty minutes.
- The curry sauce is the whole dishThe book gives no formula because one appears elsewhere under its own heading, as these alphabetical dictionaries habitually cross-referenced. Victorian curry sauces of this kind were generally flour-thickened gravies of onion, curry powder and stock, often sharpened with lemon juice or a little apple. A good jarred korma-style or a homemade onion-and-curry-powder velouté both work; a coconut-heavy modern curry sauce will overwhelm half a pound of mushrooms.
- QuantitiesHalf a pound is 225 g of button mushrooms and one ounce is 30 g of butter. You will need roughly 150–200 ml of sauce to just cover them. This serves two as a light supper or four as a savoury course.
- Skinning mushroomsPeeling the caps was standard practice when mushrooms came in from the field with grit and a tough cuticle. Cultivated buttons need nothing more than a wipe or a quick rinse and a dry; peeling only loses flavour and substance.
- Fry hard, brieflyMushrooms release a lot of water. Use a wide pan, keep the heat high for the first few minutes and let the liquid boil off before the sauce goes in, or the sauce will thin and taste washed out.
- Fifteen minutes is longButtons in sauce hold up better than most vegetables, but a quarter of an hour will take them past firm into soft. Eight to ten minutes at a bare simmer is enough to marry them to the sauce; the instruction reflects a period preference for thoroughly cooked vegetables.
- Salt lateCurry sauce made with stock is often salty already. Season the mushrooms lightly in the pan and correct at the end.
- The toastCut it thick, toast it dry and hard, and dish it at the last moment. The sauce goes round the dish rather than over, which has the practical effect of keeping the toast crisp under the mushrooms while the rice takes the sauce.
- Probable costOne shilling for the dish, at a time when a shilling would buy something like a pound and a half of cheap beef. Mushrooms were a costly vegetable, which is why so small a quantity is stretched over toast and rice.
Curried vegetables were a fixture of the late-Victorian table, where curry had settled in as an English idiom rather than an Indian one — a standing curry sauce kept in the kitchen, thickened with flour and coloured with commercial curry powder, ladled over whatever the larder held. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, a later reworking of the Dictionary of Cookery of the 1870s, is arranged alphabetically like a reference book, so a cook looking up "Mushrooms" found a run of treatments — stewed, broiled, pickled, curried — each assuming the sauces and stocks were already made and cross-referenced elsewhere. Serving a curry on toast rather than only with rice was a British habit, common to the whole family of "savouries" and light entrées that filled out the smaller courses of a dinner. Mushrooms themselves were gathered or grown in dedicated beds, hotbeds and forcing houses at this date — market gardens around London and the cave beds of France supplied the trade — but cultivation on a truly large scale came later, which explains both the shilling and the careful economy of half a pound.