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Mushrooms Under Glass with Cream
Cut some slices of bread into rounds three-eighths of an inch in thickness, and cut off the stalks from some fresh mushroom heads, and range these on individual dishes and cover with a bell of either glass or silver, and bake in the oven for twenty minutes.
With Cream: Fry in butter some turned mushrooms, adding a little fresh cream and seasoning with salt and pepper; cover and simmer until the cream becomes partially reduced, then put a slice of bread, prepared as above, on each plate, dress the mushrooms in a pyramid from, pour a portion of the liquid over each, put on the bells and bake in a slack oven for twenty minutes, serving them with the bells on.
Okras Sauted, Creole Style Prepare some okras as for boiled okras. Place in a sautepan one ounce of butter, one medium-sized onion, and a minced medium-sized green pepper, put the pan on the stove for six minutes until the contents are of a golden color, add two raw peeled tomatoes cut in pieces, three tablespoonfuls of Spanish sauce and a pinch of salt, a third of a pinch of pepper, and one crushed clove of garlic. Put in the okras, cover with the lid and put on the fire and cook for fifteen minutes. Turn out onto a hot dish, sprinkle over a teaspoonful of chopped parsley, and serve.
Two dishes from Oscar's chapter run together here; the mushroom preparation is the one the title promises. The whole point of the method is the bell: an inverted glass or silver dome traps the mushroom aroma and the steam from the cream so both are released at the table.
- The bells"Under glass" means a heatproof glass or silver dome set over the food on its own plate. Ovenproof glass cloches sold for the purpose still exist; an ordinary drinking glass or a decorative dome will crack or discolour. If you have no bell, the dish becomes creamed mushrooms on toast and the twenty-minute bake is pointless.
- "Slack oven"The recipe's own term for a cool oven; period sources put it somewhere in the region of 250-300F. The bake is not cooking the mushrooms, which are already cooked in the pan; it is holding everything hot and letting the bread absorb the cream.
- "Turned" mushroomsTurning is the old hotel practice of paring the cap into shallow flutes with a small knife for looks. Skip it and simply use whole small caps, stalks removed, or quarter larger ones.
- Bread roundsThree-eighths of an inch is a shade under 1 cm. Cut the rounds slightly wider than the base of the mushroom pyramid so the cream is soaked up rather than pooling on the plate; a light toasting first keeps them from going to paste.
- Cream"fresh cream" here means unsoured cream, and a rich one is wanted; use heavy cream. Lighter creams are more likely to split when reduced with the mushroom liquor. Reduce only until it coats, not until it is thick, since it goes on reducing under the bell.
- QuantitiesOscar gives none for the mushrooms and cream. Allow about 4 oz mushrooms, a tablespoon of butter and 3 tablespoons of cream per person as a first course.
- Okra sectionThe Creole okra that follows depends on "Spanish sauce," a preparation given elsewhere in the book; it is a brown sauce with tomato. A spoonful of tomato sauce loosened with a little stock will stand in.
Serving food sous cloche was a signature of grand-hotel dining rooms in the decades either side of 1900, and Oscar Tschirky's Waldorf is often said to have been among the American rooms that made it familiar. The device suited mushrooms better than almost anything else: their aroma is volatile and mostly lost between kitchen and table, so trapping it under a dome and lifting that dome in front of the diner turned an inexpensive garnish vegetable into a course with a small piece of theatre attached. The pairing with a round of bread is practical rather than decorative -- it catches the reduced cream, which would otherwise spread thin across the hot plate. Cultivated mushrooms were still a relative luxury in the United States at this date, grown in caves and cellars by a handful of specialist producers, which is part of why a dish of them warranted silver.