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Stewed Mushrooms (Brush one-half pound mushrooms)
Brush one-half pound mushrooms. Remove stems, scrape, and cut in pieces. Peel caps, and break in pieces. Melt three tablespoons of butter, add mushrooms, cook two minutes; sprinkle with salt and pepper, dredge with flour, and add one-half cup hot water or stock. Cook slowly five minutes.
A plain butter-and-flour stew that takes under ten minutes. Most of the fuss in the original comes from handling mushrooms that arrived at the kitchen door far dirtier and coarser than anything sold today.
- Skip the peelingFannie Farmer's cooks peeled the caps because market mushrooms came with tough, grubby skins. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms today need nothing but a dry brush or a quick wipe; peeling throws away flavour and colour.
- Keep the stemsThe instruction to scrape and cut the stems separately reflects their toughness on older, more mature specimens. Modern button and cremini stems can go in whole with the caps, trimmed only at the dried end. Shiitake stems are the exception and should be discarded or saved for stock.
- Don't wash them wetSurface water keeps the pan cool, so rinsing then sauteing gives you steamed grey mushrooms rather than browned ones. Brush, as the recipe says.
- Two minutes is shortThree tablespoons of butter over half a pound of mushrooms is generous, and the pan will take more than two minutes to drive off the liquid the mushrooms release. Cook until that liquid has evaporated and the edges are catching colour, then flour and add liquid.
- Dredge with flourThe original leaves the amount to you; a teaspoon or two is enough for half a cup of liquid, giving a light coating sauce rather than a gravy. Let it cook into the butter for a moment before the stock goes in or the sauce tastes raw.
- Stock over waterWater gives a thin, buttery sauce; chicken or mushroom stock is a marked improvement and is offered as an equal option in the original.
- YieldHalf a pound serves two as a vegetable side, or one as a topping for toast. Scale freely, but brown in batches rather than crowding the pan.
Stewed mushrooms sit in the vegetable chapter of the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book at a moment when mushrooms were shifting from a foraged luxury to a commercial crop. Commercial mushroom growing in the United States expanded considerably in the late nineteenth century, much of it in southeastern Pennsylvania, but supply was still seasonal and some households relied on field mushrooms gathered locally, which is why period cookbooks often pair their mushroom recipes with warnings about telling edible specimens from poisonous ones. The peeling and scraping in this recipe belong to that older world of dirt-crusted, mature caps. The method itself is a standard nineteenth-century vegetable treatment: butter, seasoning, a dredge of flour to bind, and a little liquid, applied to a range of other vegetables in the same chapter.