Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mushrooms, Fried
Mushrooms, Fried
Small mushrooms are best for frying, but large ones are also often cooked thus. Peel and wash them, and dry them well. Cook them in a frying-pan with a little butter, turning them about well. When done, serve with the liquor from the pan poured over, first seasoning it with salt and pepper, and a little lemon-juice; or the liquor may be poured over a slice of fried or toasted bread, and the mushrooms piled on top. Mushrooms are often fried in bacon fat, after the bacon is taken from the pan. (See MUSHROOMS AND BACON.)
A four-line method that still holds up, with two caveats: the washing step and the heat level.
- Skip the peeling, rethink the washingCultivated button and chestnut mushrooms have thin, clean skins that need no peeling; a wipe with a damp cloth or a fast rinse and a thorough pat dry is enough. The original insists on drying them well for good reason — wet mushrooms steam rather than brown.
- Heat, not butter, does the workUse a wide pan over medium-high heat so the mushrooms have room; crowded mushrooms release their water and stew grey. Cook in batches if need be, and expect 5 to 8 minutes for smalls, a little longer for thick-sliced caps.
- "A little butter"Roughly 1 oz (2 tablespoons) to 8 oz of mushrooms. Butter alone browns fast at frying heat, so add a spoonful of oil, or add half the butter at the end for flavour.
- The liquorThe pan liquor is the mushroom juices mixed with the fat; the book simply pours it over. If you want a concentrated spoonful or two rather than a thin runoff, let it bubble down until it coats before seasoning; salting early draws out water and delays browning.
- Lemon juiceA few drops only, off the heat. It is there to lift the butter, and too much flattens the savoury note the browning has built.
- Bacon fat versionBacon fat is already salted, so taste before adding more. The book fries the mushrooms in the drippings after the bacon has been lifted out, and cross-refers to its separate MUSHROOMS AND BACON entry for the combined dish.
- Yield8 oz of mushrooms serves two as a breakfast dish or piled on one substantial slice of toast each; as a garnish for grilled meat it stretches to four.
- If you are using foraged mushroomsThe book assumes field mushrooms gathered or bought with confidence. Identification is the whole risk here, and it cannot be judged from a recipe — only cook wild species you or an expert have positively identified.
Cassell's treats this briefly rather than as a dish in its own right, which tells you how mushrooms were regarded in late-Victorian England: a seasonal adjunct to the breakfast or supper plate, cheap when the fields were producing and expensive otherwise. Commercial mushroom growing in caves, disused quarries and purpose-built sheds was expanding through the second half of the nineteenth century, but the field mushroom, Agaricus campestris, gathered in autumn pasture, was still widely used; the instruction to peel is often taken to suit weathered wild caps far more than the pale cultivated ones on sale now. The pairing with bacon fat and fried bread reflects the frugal logic of the period kitchen, where the fat left in the pan was itself an ingredient rather than something to pour away.