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Baked Mushrooms
Wash, scrub, sprinkle with salt and pepper, twelve large fresh mushrooms. Remove stems, sauté in butter, add one cup chicken stock or cream, simmer fifteen minutes. Place on rounds of bread, on a buttered platter; cover and cook in oven fifteen minutes, basting once during cooking with melted butter. A few gratings of nutmeg is considered by many an improvement.
A short entrée-course recipe that assumes more than it states: no oven temperature, no clear division between caps and stems, and a total cooking time that suits the large, mature field mushrooms of 1907 better than today's tight-capped buttons.
- Read the sequence carefullyAs written, the stems are removed and then "sauté in butter" — but the dish that goes into the oven is the caps. Sauté the caps in butter, use the chopped stems in the pan for flavor (or discard them), then build the stock or cream around them.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. For a covered dish of this kind, a moderate oven of roughly 350°F is a reasonable modern choice, but the recipe specifies nothing. Covered, it is really steaming the caps rather than browning them.
- Total cooking timeFifteen minutes simmering plus fifteen in the oven is a long life for a mushroom. Large portobello or field caps can take it and will turn deeply savory; supermarket white or cremini caps will collapse and weep. With smaller mushrooms, cut both stages to about five to seven minutes.
- Stock or creamOne cup for twelve caps is a generous amount of liquid — it becomes the sauce. Let it reduce during the simmer so what spoons over the bread is glossy rather than watery. Cream will thicken on its own; stock benefits from a knob of butter swirled in at the end.
- The bread roundsPlain bread under a cup of liquid goes to paste. Toast or fry the rounds in butter first so they hold; cut them slightly wider than the caps so the sauce has somewhere to land.
- Washing"Wash, scrub" dates from a time when mushrooms arrived with soil and sometimes manure. Cultivated mushrooms need only a wipe or a quick rinse and a thorough drying — wet caps will not brown in the butter.
- Only cultivated mushrooms"Fresh mushrooms" in a 1907 book could mean gathered ones. Do not substitute foraged fungi on the strength of this recipe; it gives no identification guidance whatsoever.
- YieldTwelve caps on twelve rounds would serve about four as an entrée or six as a light savory; the recipe itself gives no yield.
Lowney's Cook Book was issued in 1907 by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate firm — a promotional volume that ranges far beyond the confectionery chapters it was written to sell. A dish of this kind belongs to the entrée course, the small hot course served between fish and roast, and that suggests something of its status: American commercial mushroom growing was still young at the turn of the century, concentrated in eastern Pennsylvania and in caves and cellars around the cities, and a dish of twelve large fresh caps was a modest luxury rather than a weeknight vegetable. Setting them on buttered rounds of bread follows the older croûte tradition, in which the toast exists to catch the sauce and give the fork something to lift. The nutmeg suggestion echoes an older English habit of spicing creamed and buttered dishes, and the phrase "considered by many an improvement" leaves the seasoning to the cook.