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Baked Mushrooms
For baking choose the larger mushrooms; peel, cut the stalks close to the top. Place them upside down in an earthen or porcelain dish, sprinkle with salt and pepper and put a tiny piece of butter in each. Bake in a quick oven twenty minutes; baste two or three times with melted butter. Serve hot on the dish in which they were baked.
A plain treatment that lives or dies on the mushrooms themselves; the only real work is managing the liquid they throw off.
- "Quick oven"Read this as roughly 400-450F. At that heat the caps brown and the moisture drives off rather than stewing in the dish.
- Twenty minutes is for big capsLarge flat field or portobello caps, gills up, will take the full twenty minutes. Anything under three inches across is done in ten to twelve, and will shrink noticeably if held longer.
- PeelingMushrooms of this period were often field-gathered and gritty. Cultivated caps do not need peeling; wipe them and remove the stalk flush with the cap so butter sits in the hollow.
- The dish mattersEarthenware or porcelain is specified, and the recipe has it go to table; a non-metal dish also avoids discolouring the mushrooms. Use a shallow gratin dish rather than a deep one, and do not crowd the caps or they will steam.
- Gills up, and stay that way"Upside down" means gills facing the ceiling, so the cap becomes a cup for the butter and the juices. Do not turn them during baking.
- BastingTwo or three bastings with melted butter is not optional gilding; it keeps the exposed gills from drying to leather. The recipe itself asks only for a tiny piece of butter in each cap plus the basting butter.
- SaltingSalt draws water out immediately. Season as they go into the oven rather than in advance, or you will start with a pool of liquid.
- YieldTwo large caps per person as a side dish, three or four on toast as a savoury or breakfast course.
Baked or grilled mushrooms in butter belong to the British and American breakfast-and-savoury tradition, where the mushroom was valued for a meaty, almost gamey flavour achieved with nothing but salt, pepper and fat. Recipes of this kind become commoner in the later nineteenth century, as commercial mushroom growing in manure beds widened supply beyond the autumn fields; earlier books tend to be more cautious, and household manuals of the period often gave space to distinguishing edible species as well as to cooking them. The instruction to serve in the baking dish is practical, and chimes with a growing taste for dishes brought to table in the vessel they were cooked in, so that no juices were lost on the way.