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Baked Mushrooms
Choose the larger mushrooms for baking. Prepare them as fo broiling and place them upside down in a shallow baking dish sprinkling with salt and pepper and placing a small piece of butter on each. Bake for about twenty minutes, basting with a little melted butter.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know the mushroom cookery of its day. The gaps are the oven temperature, what "prepared as for broiling" meant, and a bake time set for mushrooms rather larger than most of what is sold now.
- Prepared as for broilingIn cookbooks of this period that generally meant wiping the caps clean, cutting out the stem, and peeling the thin skin from the top of the cap. Peeling is unnecessary with modern cultivated mushrooms; wipe them, twist out the stems, and leave the skin on.
- Upside downGill side up, so the cap holds the butter and its own juices. This is the hinge of the dish: set them the other way and the liquor runs into the pan and the mushrooms steam in it.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350-375F, suits the twenty-minute timing. Hotter than that and the butter browns before the caps have given up their water.
- TimingTwenty minutes suits large open-gilled mushrooms, which is all the recipe specifies ('the larger mushrooms'). Portobellos of similar size will take about that; ordinary large white or cremini caps are done in 12-15 minutes, when the caps have slumped slightly and a pool of dark liquor sits in each.
- Butter and bastingThe recipe gives no quantity: a small piece on each cap and 'a little' melted butter for basting. Baste once or twice, no more; the point is to keep the exposed gills from drying, not to poach them.
- SaltSalt draws water out of the gills quickly. Season just before the dish goes into the oven rather than letting the caps sit salted on the counter.
- Dish and yieldA shallow baking dish means one layer with the caps not touching, so steam escapes. The recipe gives no yield; as a rough guide, two or three large caps make a vegetable serving for one, or one each on toast as a savoury.
Baked mushrooms belong to the moment when mushrooms stopped being a forager's luxury and became a market vegetable. Commercial growing in cellars, caves and purpose-built mushroom houses expanded sharply in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, with southeastern Pennsylvania becoming the centre of the trade. The instruction to peel the caps, standard advice then, is often said to be a holdover from handling field-gathered mushrooms of uncertain cleanliness. What is striking is how little the method has needed to change: butter, salt, pepper, gills up, a moderate oven, and nothing else in the way.