Home › Cookery › To Stew, Fry, or Broil Mushrooms
To Stew, Fry, or Broil Mushrooms
After you have peeled them, sprinkle with salt and pepper and put them in a stewpan with a little water and lump of butter. Let them boil fast for ten minutes and stir in a thickening of flour and cream. They may be broiled on a gridiron, and seasoned with butter. Fry them also in butter. The large mushrooms are used for the two latter modes of cooking them.--Mrs. C.C.
Three methods in four lines, written for large field mushrooms brought in from a pasture. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, so the notes below fill in what the original assumes you already know.
- PeelingNineteenth-century field mushrooms were peeled because the cuticle on a mature open cap is tough and often gritty. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need no peeling; wipe them and trim the stem base. Large portobellos are the closest modern match to what Mrs. C.C. had in mind.
- The ten-minute boilThis is the one instruction to reconsider. Mushrooms release their own liquid within two or three minutes; ten minutes of fast boiling leaves them slack and the pan watery. Stew until they have given up their juice and it has reduced, then thicken.
- "A thickening of flour and cream"A slurry, not a roux: roughly a teaspoon of flour whisked smooth into a quarter cup of cream for every pound of mushrooms. Added to boiling liquid it will thicken almost at once, and needs a minute or two more so the flour loses its raw taste.
- StewpanAny wide, heavy saucepan or skillet with a lid. Width matters more than depth here, since crowding steams the mushrooms rather than concentrating them.
- Broiling on a gridironA gridiron sat over coals, so the modern equivalents are a grill or a ridged grill pan over fairly high heat, gill side up first. Brush with melted butter rather than dotting it on; a broiler element also works, about four inches from the heat.
- Frying in butterButter alone browns and burns before large caps are cooked through. Use clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, and salt only near the end so the caps sear instead of stewing in their own liquid.
- IdentificationThe recipe presumes mushrooms gathered by someone who knew the local fields. If you are picking rather than buying, identification is the whole job, and several dangerous species resemble a young field mushroom closely.
- YieldA pound of mushrooms stewed with cream serves three or four as a side dish or on toast. Broiled or fried, allow one large cap per person.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by housekeepers of Virginia and neighbouring states, often identified only by initials, belongs to a period when mushrooms in America were almost entirely gathered rather than grown. Commercial cultivation was by then an established European trade, and the meadow mushroom picked from pasture after late-summer rain was, by tradition, what a cook was likely to mean by the word; suspicion of "toadstools" was widespread enough that identification tests are sometimes printed alongside cookery. The three treatments here reflect that seasonal, opportunistic supply: small ones stewed with cream, large ones broiled or fried in butter to serve with meat. Mushroom ketchup and pickled mushrooms, both common in the same books, were the way a glut got preserved for the rest of the year.