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Broiled Mushrooms
Wash, scrub, sprinkle with salt and pepper, twelve large fresh mushrooms. Broil over a clear fire. Place on twelve rounds of bread toasted on one side. Sauté in two tablespoons butter, one cup chopped mushrooms; season with salt and pepper and add one fourth cup heavy Reheat and pour over mushrooms on toast. cream.
A simple two-part dish: whole caps broiled, a duxelles-like cream of chopped mushrooms poured over. The text as printed has a line of type transposed near the end — read it as "add one fourth cup heavy cream. Reheat and pour over mushrooms on toast."
- "Broil over a clear fire"A clear fire is a charcoal or wood fire burned down past the smoke to steady, flameless coals. An overhead gas or electric broiler at full heat, rack about four inches down, is the direct equivalent; three to four minutes a side for large caps.
- The caps"Large fresh mushrooms" here means the largest cultivated caps the market offered; the recipe gives no dimension. Removing the stems (they can go into the chopped mixture) and broiling gill side up first will keep the juices in the cap rather than dripping into the fire.
- Toasted on one sideProbably deliberate rather than an oversight: the untoasted face sits under the mushroom and takes up the juices and cream, while the crisp side helps the round hold its shape.
- Washing and scrubbingPeriod mushrooms arrived with real soil on them. Modern packaged caps need only a damp cloth; soaking waterlogs the gills and they will steam rather than brown under the broiler.
- The chopped mushroomsCook them hard in the butter until the water has driven off and the pan is nearly dry before the cream goes in. Added to wet mushrooms, a quarter cup of cream will thin out and run off the toast.
- SeasoningSalt the caps just before they go under the heat. Salted early, they weep and will not take colour.
- YieldTwelve rounds; the recipe gives no serving count, but at two rounds a head it would suit six as an entrée in the period sense — a small course between fish and roast — or four as a modern light lunch.
Broiled mushrooms on toast belong to a class of small savoury courses that filled the entrée slot in late-Victorian and Edwardian American menus: something hot, buttery and served on a base of toast or pastry, sized for one or two bites per diner. Commercial mushroom growing in the United States expanded considerably in the late nineteenth century, particularly in southeastern Pennsylvania, which put cultivated caps within reach of the sort of household that bought a cookbook like this one; earlier books had to hedge with warnings about distinguishing edible field mushrooms from poisonous ones. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and, as other manufacturer-sponsored cookbooks of the era also did, it set its chocolate recipes within a full general cookery course — which is why a plain mushroom entrée sits in a book best remembered for chocolate.