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Broiled Mushrooms
Peel the mushrooms, remove the stems, and place the caps on a buttered broiler. Broil five minutes, until the mushrooms are brown and tender. Place on a hot dish with a piece of butter in each cap and a drop of lemon juice. Dust with salt and pepper and serve very hot. They may also be served on hot buttered toast.
A four-line recipe that works exactly as written, provided the mushrooms are large enough to sit flat and the heat is high enough to brown them before they weep.
- Which mushroomsThe book assumes large flat-capped mushrooms — field mushrooms or what a modern shop sells as portobello or large open-cup. Small button mushrooms will slide through a rack and steam rather than brown.
- PeelingThe recipe opens by directing that the caps be peeled, as period cookbooks commonly do. With cultivated mushrooms this is unnecessary; wipe them clean with a damp cloth instead and trim the stem flush.
- The broiler"Buttered broiler" points to a grid or wire broiler that can itself be greased, rather than to an overhead element, though gas ranges of the period often had a broiler compartment too. A gas or electric broiler at full heat with the rack 3–4 inches from the element does the same job, as does a ridged grill pan.
- Cap up or downThe recipe does not say which way up. Gill-side up throughout, the caps tend to pool their liquid; starting them gill-side down for a couple of minutes and then turning is one way round that.
- Five minutesThat is right for a fierce heat and a cap about half an inch thick. Judge by appearance rather than the clock: the mushroom should be browned at the edges and just yielding, not collapsed and grey.
- Butter and saltThe original salts and peppers only after broiling, at the table, with the butter melting into the hot cap; salting earlier draws moisture to the surface, which some cooks hold back browning.
- YieldAllow two to three large caps per person as a main course, one as a savoury or a side. On toast, the buttered bread wants to be sturdy enough to take the juices.
Meatless Cookery belongs to a wave of American cookbooks published in the years surrounding the First World War, when meat conservation was becoming a matter of public campaign as much as private economy, though the book itself appeared before American entry into the war. Cultivated mushroom growing was well established in the United States by then — growers were supplying eastern cities commercially — but the instruction to peel the caps is a holdover from the days of field-gathered mushrooms, which arrived gritty and often bruised. Broiling on a buttered grid over coals is older still, and the finish of butter, lemon and pepper in the cap resembles the English savoury course, though the resemblance is suggestive rather than a documented line of transmission into an American vegetarian book.