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Mushrooms
Salt and pepper Flour 1 pint mushrooms 1 tablespoon butter Wash the mushrooms; peel them and cut off the bottom of the stalks. Melt the butter; add the mushrooms, sprinkling them with salt, pepper and flour. Let them cook slowly in the butter and their own liquor for about fifteen minutes.
If desired, a few tablespoons of cream and a little grated nutmeg may be added to the butter, and the mushrooms served on small pieces of buttered toast.
A plain butter-stewed mushroom, thickened lightly with flour and finished as a toast dish. Two things need translating: the volume measure and the instruction to peel.
- A pint of mushroomsMushrooms were sold and measured by volume, not weight. A pint measure holds roughly 6 to 8 oz (170-225 g) of whole button mushrooms, depending on their size.
- Skip the peelingPeeling was standard when mushrooms came in with field dirt and coarse, sometimes leathery skins. Cultivated white and cremini mushrooms need only a wipe or a quick rinse and a trim of the dry stem end.
- The flour is unmeasuredThe ingredient list gives no quantity. A scant teaspoon over 8 oz of mushrooms is enough to bind the liquor into a light sauce; more than a tablespoon will turn it pasty.
- Salt timing is the hingeSalting at the start is deliberate here, not careless. It pulls the moisture out so the mushrooms stew in their own liquor rather than browning, which is the whole character of the dish. If you want browned mushrooms instead, salt at the end and use a wider, hotter pan.
- Fifteen minutes is correctUnlike many long timings in old books, this one is not an error. Slow stewing for a quarter hour concentrates the liquor and gives the soft, saucy texture intended. Keep the heat low enough that the butter never browns.
- Cream and nutmegAdd the cream in the last two or three minutes only, and grate the nutmeg sparingly — an eighth of a teaspoon is plenty for this quantity.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; this quantity will serve about two as a light supper or savoury on toast, or four as a side vegetable.
- If the mushrooms are foragedCooking does not neutralise the toxins in dangerous species, so use only mushrooms you can identify with certainty or buy.
Mushrooms on toast belongs to the late-Victorian and Edwardian "savoury" tradition, the small hot dish served at the end of dinner or at breakfast and supper, and it survived in American household cookery. Commercial mushroom growing in the United States expanded considerably around the turn of the twentieth century, much of it in cellars and later in the purpose-built houses of southeastern Pennsylvania, which is why a book like this can treat mushrooms as an ordinary vegetable-section entry rather than a luxury. The instruction to peel suggests a supply of larger, coarser, often wild-gathered mushrooms rather than the uniform cultivated buttons that made peeling pointless, though such instructions persisted in print long after those buttons were widely available. The flour-and-butter method, with cream and nutmeg offered as the optional enrichment, is a familiar treatment of the period.