Ellen Mortimer
Alive Adres 1916
MUSHROOMS-OLIVE OLIVER
Melt three tablespoons of butter in a pan or chafing dish. Add pepper and salt and plenty of paprika.
When butter is melted add three-fourths of a pint of When it boils add carefully one pound of goodsized mushrooms that have been peeled and washed thoroughly with better part of stems removed. cream.
Let all simmer not longer than nine minutes. Remove from fire and add a heaping wine-glass of good sherry. Serve at once very hot.
This is simple, but very delicious.
The text has come through with its lines transposed — the word "cream" landed a sentence late. Read it as: melt the butter, season, add three-quarters of a pint of cream, and when it boils add the mushrooms.
- The cream measurementThree-quarters of a pint is 1½ cups in American measure. Use heavy cream; anything lighter will break when it boils and again when the sherry goes in.
- A wine-glass of sherryIn period cookery a wine-glass is about 2 fluid ounces, so a "heaping" one means a generous quarter cup. Add it off the heat as directed — boiled sherry loses its aroma and leaves a flat, slightly bitter note.
- Don't peel mushroomsPeeling was standard when field mushrooms arrived gritty and thick-skinned. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need only a wipe or a quick rinse; peeling costs you flavour and most of the surface.
- Wash lightly"Washed thoroughly" is the one instruction to soften. Surface water clinging to the caps will thin the cream. Rinse briefly and pat dry.
- Nine minutes is the ceilingThe instruction not to exceed nine minutes matters: the mushrooms release their own liquid in the first few minutes, and the cream needs that time to reduce and cling. Longer than that and you risk overcooked caps and a broken sauce.
- The chafing dishThis was written for tableside cooking over a spirit lamp — gentle, indirect heat. On a modern burner keep the cream at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, or it will reduce far faster than it did in 1916.
- Paprika"Plenty of paprika" would have meant sweet paprika, most likely Hungarian, used here as much for colour against the white cream as for flavour. Smoked paprika was not part of this kitchen and will dominate the dish.
- Yield and servingA pound of mushrooms in cream serves four as a first course, or two over toast as a supper dish. It is at its best straight from the pan, as the recipe insists — the sauce dulls and thickens on standing.
This comes from Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries (1916), a collection of recipes solicited from stage performers of the day, and it carries the marks of its origin: it is a chafing-dish recipe, quick, rich, alcoholic, and built for the after-theatre supper. The chafing dish was the defining piece of equipment of that social world — a spirit lamp under a shallow pan let a host cook in the drawing room or a dressing room at midnight, with no kitchen and no servant required, and creamed mushrooms, lobster Newburg and Welsh rarebit were its standard repertoire. Cultivated mushrooms had become reliably available in American cities by this period, grown in cellars and other underground spaces, which is why a pound of them could be treated so casually here. "OLIVE OLIVER" in the heading is most likely the name of the performer credited with the recipe rather than an ingredient — nothing olive appears in the method.