Home › Vegetables › Stewed Mushrooms in Cream
Stewed Mushrooms in Cream
Prepare mushrooms as for Stewed Mushrooms. Cook with three-fourths cup cream instead of using water or stock. Add a slight grating of nutmeg, pour over small fingershaped pieces of dry toast, and garnish with toast points and parsley.
A two-line variation that assumes you have the book's base recipe for Stewed Mushrooms in front of you: mushrooms peeled and stemmed, cooked in butter, thickened lightly with flour, and moistened with liquid. Here the liquid is cream, and the whole point is that it reduces to a coating sauce rather than a soup.
- The hinge: keep the cream at a bare simmerThe hinge: keep the cream at a gentle heat -- if the base recipe's flour is in the pan, three-fourths cup of cream over direct heat can catch and scorch, and a hard boil may cause it to separate. Hold it at a low simmer and let it thicken as it goes.
- Cream then and nowGravity-separated nineteenth-century "cream" varied a good deal and was often nearer today's light cream than heavy. Heavy cream at 36 percent works and gives a richer sauce; use a little less flour if you go that route.
- Cooking timeCultivated mushrooms give up their liquid in a few minutes and are done in eight to ten. Cook until the edges are tender and the sauce has body.
- Skip the peelingThe book's base recipe has you peel the caps. Modern button and cremini mushrooms need only a wipe with a damp cloth; trim the stem ends and quarter or slice large caps.
- Nutmeg means a few strokes"A slight grating" is perhaps an eighth of a teaspoon for this quantity. Grate it fresh at the end, off the heat, so it does not turn bitter and dusty.
- Toast fingers and toast pointsThe finger-shaped pieces go under the mushrooms and soak up sauce; the points are triangles of the same toast stood around the edge as garnish. Cut the bread thin and dry it in a 300F oven rather than toasting it dark, so it holds without turning to crumbs.
- YieldThe base recipe's quantity of mushrooms is not restated here; three-fourths cup of cream suits roughly a pound, enough for two as a light main course or four as a side. Season with salt at the end, after the cream has reduced.
Creamed mushrooms on toast belong to the American luncheon and supper table of the late nineteenth century, when a single rich dish served on bread could stand in for a meat course. Mushrooms had only recently become a reliable market item in the United States: commercial cultivation expanded in the 1880s and 1890s, particularly around Philadelphia, and cookbooks of the period commonly warned readers against gathering wild fungi. The construction here, a base recipe followed by a terse variation that changes one liquid, is characteristic of how the book is organized.