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Mushroom Sandwiches
Cut mushrooms into small pieces, cook in butter until tender, season with salt and paprika and cream to make of right consistency to spread. Let it just boil once. Add lemon juice and grated nutmeg.
Spread on thin slices of whole wheat bread.
A vague but workable filling: essentially a thick mushroom duxelles loosened with cream. The whole thing hinges on cooking the mushrooms long enough to drive off their water before the cream goes in.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. For sandwiches for four, figure 8 oz mushrooms, 2 tablespoons butter, and 2 to 3 tablespoons heavy cream. Add the cream a spoonful at a time; the mixture should hold its shape on a knife, not run.
- Cook the water out firstChopped mushrooms release a great deal of liquid. Keep them over moderately high heat until the pan is dry and the pieces begin to brown, then season and add cream. Cream added early simply dilutes into a grey sauce that soaks the bread.
- "Let it just boil once"This means bring the creamed mixture barely to a boil, which tightens it a little, then take it off the heat. Prolonged boiling risks the cream separating or oiling off.
- PaprikaHere this means ordinary sweet paprika of the Hungarian type, used for colour and mild warmth. Smoked or hot paprika will dominate the mushrooms.
- Nutmeg and lemonBoth go in off the heat. Grate the nutmeg sparingly — a few strokes for the whole batch — and add lemon juice a few drops at a time, tasting; too much will curdle the appearance of the cream as well as flatten the mushroom flavour.
- BreadThe recipe specifies only thin slices of whole wheat; trimming the crusts was usual for tea sandwiches of the period. Spread the filling while it is warm enough to be pliable but not hot, or the bread will steam and go limp.
- Make-aheadThe filling keeps two days covered in the refrigerator and firms up considerably when cold; let it come to room temperature or warm it briefly before spreading. Assemble sandwiches no more than an hour or two ahead and keep them under a damp towel.
Dainty sandwiches — thin, crustless, filled with something soft and savoury — were a fixture of the afternoon tea table and the ladies' luncheon in the early twentieth century, and cookbooks of the period devote whole chapters to them, as the Five Roses Cook Book does here. The filling itself is a domesticated duxelles: mushrooms chopped fine and cooked in butter until dry, a technique long established in French kitchens and generally attributed to the household of the seventeenth-century Marquis d'Uxelles. What dates this version is the cultivated mushroom itself, which became reliably available to North American home cooks only as commercial mushroom houses spread in the decades around 1900; earlier books more often assume field mushrooms gathered in season or, failing that, bottled and canned ones. The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour, and its recipes were contributed by Canadian housewives, which accounts for the loose, conversational measurements — a cook who already knew how a spreadable filling should look needed no numbers.