Home › Chafing-Dish Dainties › Creamed Mushrooms
Creamed Mushrooms
Wipe carefully half a pound of mushrooms; peel the caps and break them in pieces. Reserve the stems for another dish. Melt three tablespoonfuls of butter in the blazer and in it sauté the mushrooms; dust with salt and pepper, add two tablespoonfuls of flour, and, when cooked in the butter, one cup of cream, gradually; stir until the sauce boils, let simmer a few minutes, then serve with toast or crackers.
Artichokes à la Bordelaise. (MRS. E. M. LUCAS.) Put one-fourth a cup of butter and half a cup of sifted bread crumbs into the blazer and light the lamp; when the crumbs are well moistened with the butter, add a teaspoonful of fine-minced parsley, one pint of cooked artichokes cut into small cubes, half a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of cay-
A plain velouté-style cream sauce built directly on the mushrooms, written for the chafing dish that stood on every Edwardian sideboard. It transfers to a skillet without any loss.
- The blazerThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, set over its own spirit lamp, sometimes above a hot-water bath. A 9- or 10-inch skillet over medium heat does the same work; you simply lose the theatre of cooking at the table.
- Peeling the capsThis instruction belongs to field and large open mushrooms with tough, sometimes gritty skin. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need nothing but a wipe with a damp cloth. Do not rinse or soak them, or they will steam rather than brown.
- Cook out the liquid firstThe hinge of the dish. Sauté until the mushrooms have given up their water and it has evaporated, then add the flour. Flour added into a wet pan gives a pasty, grey sauce instead of a nutty one.
- Flour and creamThree tablespoons butter to two of flour is a fat-heavy roux, so some of the butter stays as flavour rather than thickener. 'One cup of cream' is unspecified in the original; a heavier cream will give the richest result. Added gradually and stirred to a boil, it should thicken to a coating consistency fairly quickly.
- Simmer time"A few minutes" is enough to cook the raw taste out of the flour. Much longer and the cream reduces and can break at the edges of the pan; keep the heat gentle once it has boiled.
- The reserved stemsTrim and simmer them for a light mushroom stock, or chop them fine for a duxelles. The recipe simply says to reserve them 'for another dish'.
- YieldNo yield is given. Half a pound of mushrooms with a cup of cream would serve about two generously, or four as a small savoury course on toast or crackers.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American homes between roughly 1890 and 1915, and books like this one catered to it: a spirit lamp and a blazer let a hostess produce a hot dish at the table without a servant or a trip to the kitchen, which suited late suppers, bachelor lodgings and after-theatre entertaining. Creamed mushrooms were a natural fit — an ingredient that carried a faint air of luxury, since commercial mushroom growing in the United States was still a small industry. The instruction to peel the caps and reserve the stems is the tell that this was written before uniform, tightly closed cultivated mushrooms became the default. Collections of this kind often drew recipes from a number of contributors — the artichoke recipe running on directly beneath this one is credited to a Mrs. E. M. Lucas — a common practice in period cookbooks that doubled as community records.