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Cepes for Garnishing
Cut four cepes into pieces, and cook them in a stewpan for three or four minutes, with one tablespoonful of olive oil and half a clove of crushed garlic. Moisten with one-half pint of Spanish sauce, and serve.
A garnish rather than a dish: four mushrooms in a thin brown sauce, meant to be spooned around a roast or a steak. Everything hinges on the sauce, which the recipe assumes you already have.
- CèpesCepes are Boletus edulis, sold now as porcini. Four fresh cèpes might come to 8-10 oz, though size varies widely. Dried porcini will work if soaked in warm water for 20 minutes and squeezed dry — about 1 oz dried for that quantity — and hold back the soaking liquid for the sauce.
- Spanish sauceThis is sauce espagnole, the brown mother sauce built from brown roux, brown stock and mirepoix and reduced over hours. A hotel kitchen of this scale would have had it on hand; a home cook does not. A well-reduced brown veal or beef stock, lightly thickened, stands in honestly.
- Half a pintOne cup. Against 8-10 oz of mushrooms that is a generous amount of sauce, appropriate for something ladled over a plated roast rather than eaten alone.
- Three or four minutes is shortFresh cèpes hold a lot of water. Cook them hard in the oil so they colour and the moisture drives off before the sauce goes in, or the finished garnish will be thin and grey. Three minutes is enough only if the pan is genuinely hot and not crowded.
- The garlicHalf a clove, crushed, in a tablespoon of oil will scorch quickly and turn bitter. Add it after the mushrooms have taken colour, not before, and let it cook only until fragrant.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; four cèpes in a cup of sauce would garnish roughly four plates. It is not a side dish portion for four.
C cepes were the prestige mushroom of the French professional kitchen, and their appearance in an American hotel book of 1896 marks the reach of that kitchen into New York. Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's ma tre d'h tel rather than a cook, but the book he put his name to belongs to a world in which a recipe like this can assume half a pint of espagnole the way a modern one assumes stock from a carton. The oil-and-garlic treatment rather than butter points south ces cooked la bordelaise or in the Proven al manner are handled just this way and the dish is really a fragment of a larger composed plate, the sort of short entry that fills out a hotel book meant for cooks who already knew the framework it slotted into.