How to Cook Mushrooms in a Chafing-Dish Half an Hour Before Serving

Take a heaping plateful of nicely peeled mushrooms, put a tablespoonful of fresh butter into a chafing-dish, and pour the mushrooms on top of it. Salt and pepper them, cover them closely and let them cook twenty-five or thirty minutes. Put some nice pieces of dry toast on each plate, and serve yourself from the chafing-dish. Hail Columbia, it's good!

The way to tell good mushrooms from poisonous ones: Only gather mushrooms in open fields where cows or sheep have pastured, and those that are pink underneath, and as they grow old and large dark brown underneath. They are all rather fat and stocky. Alongside of them grow cream-colored or white poisonous ones which smell rank. Do not touch them. Confine yourself to the pink and brown only and you are safe. If you have any doubts, throw them away. There are many other species of mushrooms, but if you keep to those described you are safe, and they are the best.

From page 47 of the 1904 edition.

Original page from the book