Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Stewed Mushrooms
Stewed Mushrooms
Peel and remove the stalks from some large mushrooms, wash and cut them into halves, put two ounces of butter into a small lined saucepan with two tablespoonfuls of flour and stir this over the fire; then mix in by degrees about one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of milk, and when boiling and thickened put in the mushrooms. Season to taste with salt, pepper and a small quantity of powdered mace, and stew them gently at the side of the fire until tender. When cooked turn the mushrooms onto a hot dish, garnish with some croutons of bread that have been fried a nice brown, and serve.
A white-sauce mushroom stew of the sort that ran from breakfast sideboard to late supper at the Waldorf. It is essentially a béchamel built in the pan, with the mushrooms cooked in it rather than browned first.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup ran roughly 8 to 10 fluid ounces depending on the china, so one and a half of them is somewhere between 1 1/2 and 2 cups of milk. Start at 1 1/2 cups; the mushrooms will release liquid and thin the sauce further.
- Lined saucepanUsually a copper pan lined with tin, so that salt and acid would not attack bare copper; enamel linings were also sold under the same description. Any stainless or enamelled pan does the same job.
- Side of the fireOn a coal range the cooler edge of the top plate gave a bare simmer. That is low heat on a burner, with the sauce barely moving; a hard boil risks scorching the bottom.
- Peeling and washingCultivated mushrooms no longer need peeling, and soaking them in water waterlogs them. Wipe or brush them, trim the stem ends, and halve the caps.
- The rouxCook the butter and flour together a minute or two before adding milk, but keep it pale — this is a white sauce, not a blond one. Add the milk in stages, whisking smooth each time, or you will spend the stewing time chasing lumps.
- MacePowdered mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed, warmer and less sharp than nutmeg itself. A small pinch is the whole point of the seasoning; more than that dominates the dish.
- TimingHalved caps are tender in 10 to 15 minutes at a simmer. Longer will not hurt them but the sauce will thicken past pouring consistency, so keep a little warm milk to hand.
- YieldAbout a pound of mushrooms in this quantity of sauce serves four as a first course or on toast, two as a supper dish. Fry the croutons in butter or clarified butter and add them at the last moment so they stay crisp.
Creamed mushrooms in a mace-scented white sauce belong to the Anglo-American service tradition rather than to the French repertoire a grand hotel kitchen is better remembered for; the same dish appears in English cookery books through the nineteenth century as a savoury, a breakfast dish, or a garnish for meat. Its presence in a Waldorf book is easier to understand once one recalls that mushrooms were then expensive enough to justify a course of their own, large-scale cultivation in the United States being only in its early stages. Mace, now a back-of-the-cupboard spice, was standard in creamed dishes of the period, and is often said to have suited dairy sauces better than nutmeg.