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Baked Mushrooms
Peel the vegetables and cut off the woody stem. Grease a baking-dish with butter, put in the mushrooms, their upper sides down, and bake in a quick oven for fifteen minutes, basting twice with melted butter. Take out when done, season with salt and pepper, pour over the butter in the dish and serve.
A three-line recipe that depends almost entirely on oven heat and fat. Get those right and there is nothing else to it.
- "A quick oven"Roughly 400–450F. At that heat fifteen minutes is about right for large caps; the water inside boils off fast rather than stewing the mushrooms in their own juice.
- Upper sides downCap domes on the dish, gills facing up. The hollow underside becomes a cup that holds the melted butter and the juices the mushroom gives up, which is the whole point of the dish.
- Which mushroomsWritten for large flat field or cultivated mushrooms — portobello and big open-cap creminis are the modern equivalents. Button mushrooms are too small and too shallow to hold butter; they roast better tossed loose on a sheet pan.
- PeelingPeeling the cap was standard practice when mushrooms came in gritty from the field. With cultivated mushrooms it is unnecessary; wipe the caps and pull out the stem where it snaps at the cap. Do not soak them.
- Basting twiceKeep the melted butter warm alongside and spoon it into the gills at roughly five and ten minutes. Figure on about 1 tablespoon of butter per large cap, plus enough to grease the dish.
- Season at the endThe original salts after baking; salting early draws water out of the caps, which can leave them steaming rather than browning.
- YieldNo quantity is given. Two to three large caps per person as a side dish; use a dish just large enough to hold them in one layer, so the butter pools rather than spreading thin and scorching.
- If the mushrooms are foragedNothing in the method compensates for misidentification, and cooking does not destroy the toxins in the dangerous look-alikes. Use mushrooms whose identity you are certain of.
The Butterick Cook Book appeared in 1911, from the pattern company whose magazines had been dispensing domestic advice for decades, and it arrived at a moment when mushrooms were shifting from a foraged curiosity to a market vegetable. American commercial mushroom growing had taken hold in the last quarter of the nineteenth century — in caves, cellars and purpose-built sheds, with Chester County, Pennsylvania, becoming the centre of the trade — even as many readers were still gathering their own. The instruction to peel the caps and cut away the woody stem belongs to that field-gathered era. So does the simplicity: a good mushroom, butter, high heat and salt at the end is a treatment that predates the recipe by centuries.