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Mushrooms with Oysters
Wash, scrub, and remove stems of twelve large fresh mushrooms. Sauté in butter five minutes. Place on rounds of buttered toast, gills upward; sprinkle with salt and pepper, dot with butter. Decorate each with an oyster and sprinkle with buttered crumbs. Bake fifteen minutes in a hot oven, basting every five minutes with hot butter.
A straightforward composed savory that needs only two adjustments: the oven temperature and the fate of the oyster.
- Hot ovenIn this period "hot" generally means somewhere in the 400–450°F range. Fifteen minutes at that heat would mainly brown the crumbs; the mushrooms have already been sautéed.
- The oyster is the hingeA shucked oyster firms in about two minutes and turns rubbery well before fifteen. Add the oysters and crumb topping for the last few minutes only, or bake the mushrooms and toast first and slip the oysters under a broiler until their edges just ruffle.
- Buttered crumbsFresh soft breadcrumbs tossed with melted butter until evenly coated, roughly a tablespoon of butter to a quarter cup of crumbs. Dry commercial crumbs scorch at this heat.
- Washing the mushrooms"Wash and scrub" reflects mushrooms grown in manure beds. Cultivated caps today need only a damp cloth; do not soak them, or they will steam rather than sauté.
- Twelve large mushroomsLarge open-gilled portobello or field caps, 3–4 inches across, are the intended thing — a modern button mushroom will not hold an oyster. The stems are removed so the cap sits level, gills up, as a cup for butter and juices.
- BastingKeep the butter genuinely hot in a small pan on the stovetop; cold butter chills the surface of the mushrooms and slows browning. Two bastings will do if you shorten the bake.
- YieldTwelve caps serves four as an entrée course in the period sense — a small dish between fish and roast — or two as a modern light main with a salad.
Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounded its promotional confectionery chapters with a full run of ordinary American household cookery. This dish belongs to a distinctly turn-of-the-century New England moment: oysters were still cheap enough to use as a garnish rather than a centerpiece, and cultivated mushrooms were becoming more widely available in eastern cities. The combination of both on a round of buttered toast suggests the restaurant and club cooking of the 1890s and 1900s, when the "entrée" was a small savory course served between the fish and the roast, and when almost anything worth eating was thought to be improved by being set on toast and basted with butter.