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To Stew Mushrooms
One pint mushroom buttons, three ounces fresh butter, pepper and salt to taste, lemon juice, one teaspoonful flour, cream or milk a little nutmeg. Pare the mushrooms, put them into a basin of water with a little lemon juice. Take them from the water, put into a stewpan, with the above ingredients. Cover the pan closely and let them stew gently twenty minutes. If the pan closely and let them stew gently twenty minutes. If the mushrooms are not perfectly tender, stew them five minutes longer; remove every particle of butter which may be floating on top, and serve.--Mrs. C. C.
A plain butter stew of the kind meant to go under or beside a piece of meat rather than stand alone. The text repeats a line — a compositor's error in the original — and the cream is given without a quantity.
- A pint of buttonsMushrooms were measured by volume, not weight: a pint of small button caps is roughly 8 oz / 225 g. That serves two as a side dish, or four spooned over toast or steak.
- "Pare" the mushroomsNineteenth-century cooks peeled the thin skin from the cap and trimmed the stem base. Modern cultivated buttons are picked young and clean; wiping them and cutting off the dry stem end is enough. Peeling only wastes flesh.
- The lemon waterAcidulated water keeps cut mushrooms from browning, which mattered when the finished dish was expected to be pale. It also waterlogs them. Drain well and dry them off, or skip the soak entirely and simply squeeze lemon juice over them in the pan.
- Unmeasured cream"Cream or milk" with no quantity means a splash — two to three tablespoons is right for this volume of mushrooms. The single teaspoon of flour is there to bind that liquid with the butter, not to make a sauce.
- Twenty minutes is longMushrooms release a great deal of water in the first few minutes, then reabsorb the butter. Twenty minutes covered gives a soft, thoroughly stewed result in the period style; if you want them firmer and more concentrated, ten to twelve minutes is plenty.
- Butter and heatThree ounces of butter to half a pound of mushrooms is generous by design -- the fat is the sauce. Keep the heat genuinely gentle so the butter and cream do not split. The recipe also tells you to lift off any butter floating at the end, though it does not say why.
- NutmegGrate it fresh and use very little; a couple of scrapes. The recipe asks only for 'a little'.
- If you are using wild mushroomsThe recipe assumes cultivated field-mushroom buttons. Anything gathered should be identified with certainty by someone competent before it goes near the pan.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1877), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, is built from signed scraps like this one — "Mrs. C. C." hands over her method and the editor prints it as received, repeated line and all. The dish itself is English in descent: buttered stewed mushrooms, thickened with a dusting of flour and finished with cream and nutmeg, appear in English household books well before the Civil War, and the instruction to pare the caps and hold them in lemon water is standard in that tradition. Commercial mushroom growing in the United States was still in its infancy in the 1870s, and the recipe accordingly treats its pint of buttons as a small, seasonal quantity to be stretched with butter rather than a staple bought by the pound.