Home › Vegetables › Dried Mushrooms
Dried Mushrooms
Wipe the mushrooms clean, and peel off the skin.. Cover the bottoms of shallow baking-pans with white paper, put the mushrooms in a single layer on this, and stand in a cool oven to dry. When dry and shriveled, take them out, put in paper bags, and hang in a cool, dry place.
When wanted for use, put them in cold water or milk, and bring slowly to a simmer. In this way they will regain nearly their natural size and flavor.
STEWED MUSHROOMS, No. 1.
Pcel the mushrooms, wash them in cold water and cut off the bottom of the stalks. Then put them in a porcelain saucepan; to every pint of mushrooms, add one tablespoonful of butter rolled in flour. Let the mushrooms e
Two things in one entry: a method for drying mushrooms for storage, and the opening of a stewed-mushroom recipe that the page cuts off mid-sentence. The drying method still works, but the temperature and the definition of "dry" both need pinning down.
- "A cool oven"The recipe names no temperature. For drying, the lowest setting an oven will hold, in the region of 120-150F, with the door propped an inch to let moisture escape, does the job; a dehydrator does the same with less babysitting. Bear in mind that in period usage a "cool oven" was generally hotter than this. Too much heat and the mushrooms cook and brown rather than drying.
- Dry means brittle, not leatheryThis is the hinge. "Dry and shriveled" is not enough of a target: the pieces should snap cleanly, not bend. Any residual moisture in the centre will mould in the bag within weeks. Slicing caps 1/4 inch thick rather than leaving them whole makes the endpoint far more reliable.
- Skip the peelingPeeling made sense for large field mushrooms with tough, often gritty cuticles. Cultivated buttons, creminis and portobellos need only a wipe with a damp cloth. Do not wash mushrooms you intend to dry.
- Paper bagsThe bags are for airflow while any last traces of moisture equalise, which is sound for the first week. After that, transfer to airtight jars kept dark; paper does not keep out insects, humidity, or the smell of a pantry.
- RehydratingCold water or milk brought slowly to a simmer will take something like half an hour for whole caps and rather less for slices; judge by the texture. Strain and keep the liquid, which holds much of the extracted flavour, and add it to the dish. Grit settles at the bottom, so pour off rather than tipping everything in.
- "Butter rolled in flour"The same principle as a beurre manie: butter and flour worked together cold and dropped into the pan to thicken as it melts, though rolling a lump of butter in flour carries less flour than the equal-parts version. One tablespoon per pint of mushrooms gives a light coating sauce, not a gravy.
- "Porcelain saucepan"Enamelled cast iron or stainless steel. The point was a non-reactive surface: mushrooms cooked in bare iron or unlined copper turn a grey-black that looks worse than it tastes.
- YieldA pound of fresh mushrooms dries down to roughly 1 to 1.5 ounces. Reckon about an ounce of dried to replace a pound of fresh in a cooked dish.
- The recipe is cut off"Let the mushrooms e--" is where the source page ends. Comparable recipes of the period generally go on to cover and stew the mushrooms gently in their own liquor for a quarter of an hour or so, seasoning at the end.
Drying was the ordinary way of keeping mushrooms through the year before home canning and freezing were general, and it sat alongside mushroom ketchup and mushroom powder among the standard preserves in nineteenth-century English and American kitchens. The mushroom being dried here is almost certainly the field mushroom, Agaricus campestris, gathered in autumn pasture rather than bought; commercial cultivation in the United States was under way in Pennsylvania from the mid-1880s, which is why so much of the instruction is about cleaning and peeling wild caps. The advice to soak in milk is a period habit that turns up repeatedly, said to soften the mushroom and mellow its flavour, though water and the reserved soaking liquid give the more concentrated result. One caveat the original assumes and does not state: everything here presumes the gatherer already knows the species with certainty, which is not a judgement to make from a book.