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Baked Mushrooms in Cream
Wash twelve large mushrooms. Remove stems, and peel caps. Put in a shallow buttered pan, cap side up. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and dot over with butter; add twothirds cup cream. Bake ten minutes in a hot oven. Place oven. on pieces of dry toast, and pour over them cream remaining in pan.
Sautéd Mushrooms Wash, remove stems, peel caps, and break in pieces; there should be one cup of mushrooms. Put two tablespoons butter in a hot omelet pan; when melted, add mushrooms which have been dredged with flour, few drops onion juice, one-fourth teaspoon salt, a few grains pepper, and cook five minutes. Add one teaspoon finely chopped parsley and onefourth cup boiling water. Cook two minutes, and serve on dry toast.
Two mushroom preparations run together in the original text, both finished on toast. Neither is complicated; the details that matter are the oven heat, the cream, and what "peel caps" meant in 1896.
- A hot ovenThe book gives its oven heats by description rather than by number, so no exact figure can be read off the text; "hot" is conventionally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. Ten minutes at that heat suits cultivated caps of moderate size; very large caps may want fifteen, and they are done when the cream is bubbling and slightly reduced.
- Peeling the capsField and market mushrooms of the period often had tough, gritty skin, so cooks pulled it away from the cap edge. Modern cultivated white or cremini mushrooms do not need it — wipe or rinse them and leave the skin on. Save the stems for stock.
- Cap side upThis means the domed side facing the ceiling, gills down into the buttered pan, so the cream steams up through them. If you want the cream to pool in the caps instead, turn them gill side up; it makes a richer, saucier dish and is equally good.
- CreamNineteenth-century dairy cream varied considerably and could fall anywhere between what we now sell as light and heavy cream; Farmer's book elsewhere distinguishes thin cream from heavy. Two-thirds cup is about 160 ml. A richer cream is the safer choice, as thinner cream is more liable to thin out or separate at this heat.
- Omelet panFor the sautéed version this simply means a shallow, sloped-sided skillet, not a nonstick omelette pan. Any 8–10 inch frying pan works; get it properly hot before the butter goes in so the mushrooms sear rather than stew.
- Onion juiceA period shortcut for onion flavour without pieces: grate half an onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion through a sieve. A few drops is genuinely all that is wanted.
- The flour dredgeThe mushrooms are floured before they hit the butter, so when the quarter cup of boiling water goes in at the end it thickens into a light pan gravy. Dredge lightly — a heavy coating turns pasty.
- YieldTwelve large caps serve three or four as a vegetable course, two as a light supper. The sautéed version, starting from one cup of mushrooms, is a single generous portion on toast.
- The toast"Dry toast" means unbuttered — it is there to absorb cream, and butter would keep it from doing so. Toast it well; soft bread collapses under the sauce.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book appeared in 1896, a period in which mushrooms were shifting from a foraged luxury to a market vegetable in American cities. Commercial mushroom growing in caves, cellars and purpose-built houses expanded in the United States through the 1880s and 1890s, and Farmer, for her part, simply says "wash twelve large mushrooms" and gets on with it. The dish itself belongs to a large family of Anglo-American savouries served on toast — mushrooms, kidneys, sardines, creamed chicken — which functioned as a light supper, a breakfast dish, or the small course served after the sweet at a formal dinner. Placing a vegetable on toast solved a practical problem as much as a culinary one: it gave a wet preparation something to sit on and kept it from flooding the plate.