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Mushrooms Sauted
Pick some mushrooms and put them in a basin of water with the juice of a lemon or some vinegar. Take out and dry on a cloth, melt a lump of butter in a sautepan, put in the mushrooms, with salt and pepper to taste, and a small quantity of nutmeg; toss over the fire until cooked. Mushrooms Sauted, Bordelaise Style Select the largest, dryest and thickest mushrooms, pare, wash, dry and cut into lozenge shape, place them in an earthenware dish, sprinkle over one tablespoonful of sweet oil, a little salt and twelve whole peppers, and leave them in the marinade for two hours. Take them out, stew for six minutes; when done place on a dish. Put three tablespoonfuls of oil in a stewpan with one teaspoonful of parsley, anchovies, and a clove of crushed garlic, heat for five minutes, add to the mushrooms, and serve.
Two related preparations run together in one paragraph: a plain butter sauté and a marinated version in the Bordeaux manner. Both are quick, and both depend on getting the mushrooms dry before they meet the fat.
- "Pick some mushrooms"Read this as select, not forage. Use cultivated white, cremini or large portobello caps; wild species should only be cooked by someone who can identify them with certainty.
- The acidulated waterThe lemon or vinegar bath keeps pale mushrooms from browning, a concern in a hotel kitchen preparing them in advance. It also waterlogs them, so the drying on a cloth is not optional. If you are cooking immediately, brush or briefly rinse and skip the soak.
- "A lump of butter"About 2 tablespoons for a pound of mushrooms. Get the pan hot and work in batches; crowded mushrooms steam in their own liquid instead of browning.
- "Toss over the fire until cooked"Six to eight minutes over fairly high heat, until the released water has boiled off and the edges are gold. Salt at the start draws out moisture; if you want more colour, salt at the end instead.
- Sweet oilOlive oil, sold as "sweet oil" through the nineteenth century to distinguish it from lamp and machine oils. Use a decent but not peppery one.
- "Twelve whole peppers"Whole black peppercorns, meant to perfume the marinade rather than be eaten. Pick them out before the mushrooms go in the pan.
- "Stew for six minutes"Most likely cooking them through in a pan with the marinade oil rather than simmering in liquid, though the book does not say. Six minutes suits mushrooms cut in fairly thick lozenges.
- The anchovy and garlic sauceNo quantity is given for the anchovies; two fillets mashed to a paste suits a pound of mushrooms. The recipe calls for only one teaspoonful of parsley, though a tablespoon of chopped parsley is more to modern taste. Five minutes over heat is generous for crushed garlic in oil, so keep the flame low and stop before it colours, or the whole dish turns bitter.
- YieldA pound of mushrooms prepared either way serves four as a vegetable alongside beef or lamb, or two on toast.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and put his name to The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a vast compilation of the French-derived repertoire an American luxury hotel was expected to command. The bordelaise label here is the older, southwestern sense of the word — olive oil, garlic, parsley, sometimes anchovy — rather than the red wine and marrow sauce that now monopolises the name; in and around Bordeaux the classic treatment of a cèpe has long been exactly this, sliced thick and cooked in oil with garlic and parsley. That two such different preparations share a name is a reminder that French culinary terms were regional before they were codified. Commercial cultivation of mushrooms in dark cellars and quarries, developed around Paris earlier in the century, had by this date grown considerably, though how far that supply reached American hotel kitchens year-round is not something the book tells us.