Home › Vegetables › Mushrooms Under Glass
Mushrooms Under Glass
Cream two tablespoons of butter and add one-half tablespoon of lemon juice, drop by drop, salt, pepper and one-fourth teaspoon of finely chopped parsley. Cover the bottom of an individual baking-dish with a circular piece of toast three-eighths-inch thick wetting the underside with half the sauce already made. Pile mushroom caps cleaned and peeled on toast and pour over remainder of sauce and finally one-fourth cup of heavy cream. Cover with glass and bake about twenty-five minutes. A teaspoon of sherry may be added before serving, if desired.
These baking dishes with bell-shaped glass covers are now obtainable at most house-furnishing stores. They must be served with covers on.
A single-serving dish that depends almost entirely on trapped steam. Everything here is straightforward except the vessel, which is the part that has vanished from house-furnishing stores.
- YieldAs written this makes one serving, in one individual dish. Multiply by the number at the table; each person gets their own covered dish, uncovered in front of them.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, suits the 25-minute time for whole caps under a cover. Hotter and the cream will break before the mushrooms have given up their liquid.
- The cover is the recipeThe bell of glass holds in the mushroom steam and the sherry aroma, which is why the book insists it reach the table still covered. Any tight lid will cook the dish, but a clear one is the whole point of serving it.
- Antique glass bellsOld cloches were often thin soda-lime glass and are not reliable in a modern oven, particularly if they go in cold and come out onto a cool surface. A tempered glass lid or a small Pyrex bowl inverted over an ovenproof ramekin does the same work.
- Peeling mushroomsStandard practice in the period, unnecessary with cultivated white or cremini caps today. Wipe them, trim the stem flush, and leave the skin; peeling costs you flavor and much of the cap's structure.
- Lemon juice drop by dropThis is not fussiness. Added all at once to creamed butter the acid and water separate out; drop by drop it stays emulsified and the sauce coats the toast instead of pooling.
- The toastThree-eighths of an inch is about the thickness of a standard sandwich slice, and it needs to hold up. Cut it from a sturdy loaf and toast it dry and firm, since half the butter sauce goes underneath and a quarter cup of cream comes down on top.
- SherryStirred in at the end, off the heat, so the aroma is released when the cover is lifted. A dry or medium sherry; cream sherry will read as sweet against the mushrooms.
Serving food sous cloche was a restaurant flourish of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a waiter lifting a glass bell released a puff of scented steam at the table. The style is generally traced to French hotel kitchens and was popular in the chophouses and hotel dining rooms of New York, where mushrooms and squab under glass appeared on menus. Butterick's inclusion of it, complete with the note that the dishes are "now obtainable at most house-furnishing stores," suggests how quickly a restaurant trick became a domestic ambition, with the home cook being offered the equipment to present the dish theatrically. The instruction to serve with the covers on is the closest this book comes to stage direction.