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Mushrooms Stewed with Cream
Prepare a pound of mushrooms by paring off the ends, then clean and wash them well, and if very large cut them in half. Drain and place them in a saucepan with three ounces of butter. Season with salt and pepper and cook for five minutes. Add two tablespoonfuls of white sauce and half a cupful of sweet cream, cook for four minutes longer, and serve in a hot dish with eight heart-shaped bread croutons for garnish.
A simple sauté-and-cream dish that depends almost entirely on driving off the mushrooms' water before the cream goes in. A few of the assumptions behind it are worth spelling out.
- Paring the endsNineteenth-century mushrooms came in with soil and a length of stem; trimming the base and peeling the cap was routine. Cultivated button or cremini mushrooms today need only the dry end of the stem removed.
- Wash, but drain hardThe instruction to wash is fine, but water is the enemy here. Drain thoroughly and pat dry, or the five minutes in butter will steam rather than brown and the sauce will thin out.
- Three ounces of butterThat is six tablespoons to a pound of mushrooms — generous by modern habit but not a mistake. Mushrooms absorb fat greedily at first and release it again as they give up their liquid.
- Five minutes is shortA pound of mushrooms in one pan will need closer to eight or ten minutes over fairly high heat to release and re-evaporate their water. Use a wide pan and do not crowd it.
- White sauceThe recipe assumes a white sauce already made, as a hotel kitchen would have. Two tablespoons is a thickener, not a flavour: a roux of a teaspoon each of butter and flour cooked into a little milk stands in for it.
- Sweet creamSimply cream that has not soured — heavy or whipping cream is the right substitute. Half a cup finishes the pound without drowning it.
- Heart-shaped croutonsBread cut with a cutter and fried in butter, a standard garnish of the period. Purely decorative, and easily skipped.
- YieldA pound of mushrooms serves four as a side or two as a supper dish on toast.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's kitchen into print in 1896, was not a chef, and the book reads as a record of what the hotel's cooks actually sent out. Creamed mushrooms sat in the useful middle of such a menu: a vegetable course, a garnish for meat, a filling for a pastry case, or a light dish for someone eating late. The pound of cultivated mushrooms is itself a mark of the period — commercial mushroom growing had expanded sharply in the United States by the 1890s, making a dish like this a hotel staple rather than a seasonal luxury. The heart-shaped croutons are a survival of an older French garnishing vocabulary, in which shaped fried bread sippets were a conventional accompaniment.