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Stewed Mushrooms
Take one quart of cleaned mushrooms; two tablespoons of butter; one tablespoon of flour; one teaspoon of salt; one-fourth teaspoon of pepper and one-half cup of water. Rub the flour to a smooth paste in the water. Put the mushrooms, flour and seasoning together in a stewpan, and boil gently for five minutes, stirring constantly. Serve very hot. When milk or cream is preferred in the cooking, use but half the quantity of water, adding a cup of milk; and after boiling five minutes, serve as above. If cream is used, allow half the quantity of butter as the mushrooms are very rich.
A plain white-sauce stew that depends on the mushrooms' own liquor for flavor. The ingredient list and the method disagree in one place, which is worth sorting out before you start.
- The butter is missing from the methodTwo tablespoons are listed but never mentioned again. Add it to the pan with the mushrooms and flour-water, or melt it first and let the mushrooms take a little color before the liquid goes in, which improves the dish considerably.
- A quart of mushroomsThis is a volume measure of cleaned caps, roughly 1 lb / 450 g of whole button or cremini mushrooms, more if they are large and sliced. Serves three or four as a side, or two on toast.
- StewpanA heavy, straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Any wide saucepan or sauté pan works; wider is better, since the mushrooms will throw off water and you want it to reduce rather than pool.
- Rub the flour smooth in the waterUse cold water for the slurry and stir it well before it goes near heat, or the flour will set in lumps. One tablespoon of flour to half a cup of liquid is a thin binding, not a thick sauce.
- Five minutes is rightCultivated mushrooms are tender from the start; the five minutes is for the flour to lose its raw taste and the liquor to come out. Longer will not hurt the flavor but the mushrooms will shrink and the sauce will thin as they weep.
- Salt timingThe teaspoon of salt goes in at the start here, which draws liquid from the mushrooms quickly. If you want them browned first, hold the salt back until after they have taken color.
- The cream versionHalf the water plus a cup of milk gives a much looser sauce for the same tablespoon of flour; expect a creamed dish to spoon over toast rather than a coated one. With cream, halve the butter as directed.
- CleaningWipe or rinse briefly and dry. Mushrooms soaked in water absorb it and then release it into the pan, which is the enemy of a five-minute stew.
The Butterick Cook Book came out of the same New York publishing house that sold dress patterns and The Delineator, and its vegetable chapter reflects a moment when mushrooms had just become an ordinary purchase rather than a forager's prize. Commercial mushroom growing in cellars and purpose-built houses expanded in the United States in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and by the 1910s a housekeeper could reasonably be told to "take one quart of cleaned mushrooms" without any discussion of where to find them or how to tell a field mushroom from something worse — books often did. The dish itself is the standard creamed-vegetable formula of the period, butter and flour and liquid, applied to what was still regarded as a slight luxury; the closing note that cream needs less butter "as the mushrooms are very rich" is the kind of frugal adjustment the book seems inclined to make.