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Mushroom Puree
Remove the stalks and skins from some mushrooms, chop, put in a pan with some milk and simmer for ten minutes. Add the crumb of a French roll and stir till the moisture has evaporated. Add butter, salt and pepper, and rub through a sieve.
A bread-thickened vegetable puree of the old school, written in the shorthand a professional kitchen could fill in for itself. The quantities are all left to the cook, so treat the method as the recipe and scale by feel.
- Quantities to start fromFor a side or garnish serving four, use about 1 lb mushrooms, 1 cup milk, the crumb of one small soft roll (roughly 1 cup loosely packed), and 2 tbsp butter. That gives a thick, spoonable puree rather than a soup.
- "The crumb of a French roll"This means the soft interior of a plain white roll with the crust discarded, not a modern baguette's crust-heavy crumb. Any soft white bread torn into pieces does the same job; it is here purely as a starch binder in place of flour or roux.
- Skinning mushroomsPeeling caps is routinely directed in cookbooks of this period, as here. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need only a wipe, so skip the skinning and keep the stalks unless they are woody — they carry a good deal of the flavour.
- The hinge: cook off the moisture"Stir till the moisture has evaporated" is the step that decides the dish. Mushrooms are mostly water, and if you sieve while the mixture is still loose you get grey mushroom milk. Keep it over moderate heat, stirring, until a spoon drawn through leaves a clear track.
- Ten minutes in milkThat is enough for chopped mushrooms to soften and give up their liquid. Keep it at a bare simmer — milk left at a boil will scorch on the pan bottom and tint the whole puree.
- Sieve or blenderA drum sieve and wooden pestle would have been the tool for this in a kitchen of the period. A food processor followed by a pass through a fine sieve gets closer to the intended texture than either alone; the sieve is what removes the fibrous bits the blades miss.
- SeasoningButter, salt and pepper go in at the end, after the moisture has been driven off. A grating of nutmeg or a spoonful of cream stirred in off the heat suits the style, though the recipe calls for neither.
- How it was usedA puree this stiff would suit a bed under poached eggs, chicken or sweetbreads, a filling for vol-au-vents and tartlets, or thinning with stock into a cream soup. The recipe itself gives no serving direction.
Bread-thickened purees belong to an older tradition in which the crumb of a stale roll was a common way to give body to a vegetable pulp — the same trick that thickens Spanish gazpacho and Italian pappa al pomodoro. Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's reputation for some fifty years from 1893, published his Cook Book in 1896; entries like this one read as reminders rather than instructions, with quantities, yield and serving left to a cook who already knew them. Mushroom puree of this type underpinned a number of dishes on a Gilded Age menu, many of them labelled in French, and a comparable modern preparation is the duxelles-and-cream mixture still spooned under grilled meat and into pastry cases.