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Mushrooms in Cream
Peel and trim one pound of mushrooms and put them in a saucepan with one tablespoon of butter and cook a few minutes. Add one tablespoon of cream, and cook until the mushrooms are tender. Season with salt, pepper, and serve on toast.
A four-line recipe that depends almost entirely on how the mushrooms are handled in the first two minutes. The quantities are sparse even by the standards of the book, and one of them is worth questioning.
- Drive off the water firstThe hinge of the dish is getting the mushrooms to release and then evaporate their liquid before the cream goes in. Use a wide pan over fairly high heat and leave them alone until they have browned at the edges; crowding them into a small saucepan, as written, steams them into something grey and watery.
- One tablespoon of creamThis is probably meant as written — a gloss rather than a sauce — but it will barely coat a pound of mushrooms. For a sauce that clings, 3 to 4 tablespoons of heavy cream, reduced, is closer to modern expectation.
- PeelingPeriod cookbooks often instruct peeling, plausibly because mushrooms then reaching market were coarser-skinned and dirtier than today's. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need only a wipe or a quick rinse; peeling them costs flavour and volume for nothing.
- TrimmingTrim the dried end of the stem only. The stems of button and cremini mushrooms are perfectly good; discard them entirely only with shiitake, whose stems stay woody.
- "Cook until tender"A pound of mushrooms takes roughly 8 to 10 minutes in a hot wide pan — a few minutes to release their water, a few more to brown once it has gone. They do not become tough with longer cooking, but they do shrink markedly, to something like a third or a half of their raw bulk.
- SeasoningSalt draws water out, so hold it back until the mushrooms have browned rather than adding it at the start. A little lemon juice or a spoonful of sherry stirred in at the end is a period-appropriate lift the recipe leaves out.
- YieldA pound of mushrooms serves two as a light supper on toast, or four as a side. Toast the bread firmly — thin soft toast collapses under the cream.
Creamed mushrooms on toast belonged to a whole family of "on toast" dishes that carried the light meal in Anglo-American households of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: creamed eggs, creamed chipped beef, sardines, mushrooms. The dish sat comfortably within the particular logic of vegetarian and wartime-economy cookery of the period, which leaned hard on mushrooms for their savoury, meaty character long before anyone had the word umami to explain why they worked. Commercial mushroom cultivation in caves and cellars had expanded on both sides of the Atlantic through the 1800s, moving the mushroom from a foraged luxury toward something a cook could reasonably buy by the pound.