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Stewed Mushrooms for Garnish
Clean and wash one pound of mushrooms, and cut them, with their stalks, into slices about one-fourth of an inch thick. Put one-fourth of a pound of butter into a fryingpan on the fire, and when the butter is quite hot, without being colored, add the mushrooms, with a little pepper and salt, and toss for four or five minutes. Then sprinkle with one ounce of flour, and toss them again for one minute longer; add one teacupful of broth, one tablespoonful each of minced parsley and shallot, and when they are of a light brown color they are done and ready for use.
A simple butter-and-flour mushroom ragout meant to be spooned around a roast or into vol-au-vents rather than eaten on its own. Two things decide whether it works: heat high enough that the mushrooms release and reabsorb their liquid, and a pan wide enough that they are not steaming in a crowd.
- Get the pan hot firstThe butter should be foaming and fragrant but not browned before the mushrooms go in. If the fat is only warm, the slices leach water and stew grey instead of taking colour, and no amount of later cooking recovers it.
- A teacupfulNot a fixed measure; period sources reckon it anywhere from about 4 to 6 fluid ounces, i.e. half to three-quarters of a modern cup. Err on the low side and add more broth if the mixture tightens too far.
- One ounce of flourAbout 3 tablespoons, or a scant quarter cup. With 4 ounces of butter this is a loose roux, so the finished garnish is bound and glossy rather than saucy.
- The butter is a period quantityFour ounces to one pound of mushrooms is very rich by current practice. Half that amount browns the mushrooms perfectly well; the flour still has enough fat to cook in.
- Washing mushroomsThe recipe calls for washing. Modern cultivated mushrooms need only a wipe or a fast rinse and a thorough drying in a towel, since surface water is the enemy of the four-or-five-minute toss.
- Broth means real stockBroth -- The recipe leaves the broth unspecified. A well-flavoured unsalted stock gives the best result; a pale or salty commercial broth will taste flat, so season at the end.
- Slice thicknessA quarter inch is deliberate. Thinner slices collapse into the sauce during the tossing and you lose the distinct pieces that make it a garnish.
- YieldAbout two cups, enough to garnish a roast or fill patty shells for four to six. It reheats gently but the mushrooms firm up, so make it close to service.
Oscar Tschirky's book records the working repertoire of the original Waldorf-Astoria kitchen around 1896, and this entry belongs to a class of preparations that no diner ever ordered by name: garnitures ready to be spooned around a saddle of mutton, folded into an omelette, or piled into a vol-au-vent. The method is standard French practice of the period -- mushrooms sautéed in butter, dusted with flour, moistened with stock, finished with parsley and shallot -- and it is a small cousin of the *duxelles* and *champignons à la poulette* that appear in French manuals of the same generation. Commercial cultivation of *Agaricus* in the United States was only beginning to scale up in the 1890s, and a kitchen able to call for a pound of them casually, stalks and all, was advertising its supply lines.