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Roasted Mushrooms
Place the mushrooms upside down in a tin dish, sprinkle with salt and pepper and place a bit of butter in each cup. Use only those that have not lost all their plumpness and erectness and are truly little cups. Set the pan on the top of the stove, and cook for five minutes or so in a moderate heat. The cups will be filled with their own liquor and the gravy from the seasoning. Serve while very hot.
A method rather than a formula: whole caps cooked gills-up so they hold their own juices. Everything depends on the mushrooms themselves.
- Despite the title, this is stovetop"Set the pan on the top of the stove" means direct heat, not the oven. On a modern burner that is medium-low; a covered skillet works better than an open tin, since the lid keeps the caps steaming in their own liquor rather than drying out.
- "A tin dish"Any shallow metal pan that sits flat on the burner. A cast-iron or heavy stainless skillet is the closest modern equivalent and gives more even heat than thin tinware.
- What to buyThe recipe wants firm, domed caps that still curl under, not flat open ones that have gone papery at the edge; it specifies "truly little cups." Small to medium cremini of a uniform size, stems twisted out, come closest. Wipe rather than soak them.
- Gills up, and keep them thereThe point of the dish is that each cap becomes a cup of its own liquor. Do not turn them, and do not crowd the pan, or the released juice pools and boils instead of collecting in the caps.
- Five minutes is for small capsSmall field mushrooms should be done in the five minutes the recipe allows. Larger, thicker caps will want longer over gentle heat, until the cap is tender at the thickest point and the hollow is full of dark liquid.
- Butter and salt"A bit of butter" in each cup: a small knob, roughly a teaspoon, is a reasonable reading. Salt draws the liquor out, and the recipe seasons at the start rather than at the table.
- ServingGood over buttered toast, which catches the juice, though the recipe itself says only to "serve while very hot" and gives no quantities.
- If you have gathered them yourselfForaged fungi should only be eaten on the judgment of someone who can positively identify the species; several dangerous mushrooms resemble the common field mushroom at the button stage.
When this appeared, in an American household cookery book of the early 1900s, mushrooms were still as much a gathered food as a bought one — the fussy instruction to use only caps that keep "their plumpness and erectness" reads like the language of someone sorting a basket brought in from a pasture, where the meadow mushroom, Agaricus campestris, came up after late-summer rain. Commercial cultivation of its close relative was established in caves and cellars by then, in France and increasingly in Pennsylvania, but the crop was seasonal, perishable and expensive, which may be why period cookbooks treat a plain dish of whole caps as something worth its own entry rather than a garnish. The method is a simple one: turn the cap into a vessel, salt it so it gives up its liquid, and let it cook in what it produces, adding nothing that would compete.