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Mushrooms (Very carefully or you will)
very carefully or you will break them into halves. Place them over a clear fire and broil slowly until tender; they should be broiled first on one side, then turned and broiled on the other. Open the broiler carefully, remove the mushrooms with a spoon, place them on small squares of buttered toast. Pour melted butter in the centre of each and serve very hot.
The page opens mid-sentence — the missing lines almost certainly covered peeling the caps, trimming the stems and laying them in a wire broiler. What survives is a complete method for grilled mushrooms on toast, and it still works.
- What "broiler" means hereNot the overhead element of a modern oven but a hinged wire gridiron that clamps the food and is turned bodily over coals. The instruction to "open the broiler carefully" refers to unhinging that cage. A ridged grill pan or an outdoor grill reproduces it; an oven broiler works but gives you no second side to turn.
- Choose flat capsThe dish suits large open caps: butter is poured "in the centre of each," which implies a cup-shaped cap, and they must be firm enough to lift whole with a spoon. Portobellos or large flat cremini are the nearest modern equivalent; button mushrooms are too small for this treatment.
- Gills up firstWhich side first -- The recipe does not say. In practice it is worth finishing gill-side up, so the liquor that collects in the cup is not lost to the fire; the toast catches what does run out.
- TimingThe recipe gives no time; "slowly until tender" works out to roughly four to six minutes a side over a medium fire for a large cap. The mushroom is done when it darkens, softens and beads with liquid; pushed further it dries out and turns leathery.
- A clear fireMeans coals that have burned down past the flame stage, with no smoke. Flames scorch the exposed gills before the flesh cooks through.
- ButterBrush the caps with melted butter before broiling as well as pouring it in at the end, or the exposed surfaces will dry. Salt and pepper are unstated but assumed.
- YieldAllow two to three large caps and one square of toast per person as a savoury or light supper dish; more if it is standing in as a main course.
- If you are gathering your ownPeriod cookbooks took field-mushroom identification for granted in a way no modern writer should. Use cultivated mushrooms unless a knowledgeable forager has confirmed the identification.
Broiled mushrooms on buttered toast belong to the English savoury tradition that American cookbooks of the late nineteenth century often drew on — a small, strongly flavoured dish served at the end of dinner or at breakfast rather than as a vegetable side. Mushrooms were then something of a category unto themselves: not quite a vegetable, not quite a meat, but a relish valued for the meaty depth we would now call umami. Field mushrooms were seasonal and largely gathered, which is why so many books of the period pair mushroom recipes with anxious pages on telling the edible from the poisonous; commercial cultivation in the United States is generally said to have begun making them a reliable market item around the turn of the century. Toast as a base is the giveaway of the form — it exists to catch the buttery liquor the caps release, and the dish is generally traced to the same family of English "savouries" that produced Welsh rarebit and devilled kidneys.