No. 2724

Cepes Baked with Cream

Cepes Gratines a la Creme

Suppress the stalks from some clean cepes; divide the heads and salt over, flour them briskly and put them into a sautoir with hot butter, moisten with a little good raw cream, adding chopped onions and parsley and a bunch of fennel; finish cooking very slowly while covered for three-quarters of an hour, then remove with a skimmer, lay them in a bowl, and thicken the gravy with some good bechamel sauce (No. 409); let this reduce without creasing to stir and when the sauce becomes succulent add to it the cepes and let cook for two minutes. Pour the stew into a vegetable dish, bestrew with bread-crumbs and bake for ten minutes in a quick oven; serve the cepes in this same dish.

← No. 2723 Cepes, Provencal Style Mushrooms & Truffles No. 2725 Cepes Minced in Croustades →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes a French professional kitchen with a numbered sauce already made and a coal range that runs hot on top and hotter inside. The dish itself is simple: porcini stewed slowly in cream, bound with béchamel, crumbed and browned.

What a cèpe isCepes are Boletus edulis — porcini, penny buns, Steinpilze. Fresh ones are seasonal and expensive; dried porcini rehydrated in warm water will work, though they release far more liquid and far more flavour, so use the soaking liquid sparingly and expect a shorter cooking time.
Suppressing the stalks"Suppress" is a literal rendering of supprimer — remove them. Cèpe stalks are firmer than the caps and cook at a different rate; save them for a duxelles or the stock pot rather than discarding.
SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan with a lid, wider than a saucepan. A 10-inch skillet with a cover does the same job. The width matters: crowded mushrooms steam instead of colouring.
Raw cream"Good raw cream" most likely means simply fresh, uncooked cream — cream that has not been scalded or worked into a sauce — rather than any special preparation. Heavy cream is the substitute, and since it will simmer covered for the better part of an hour, pasteurisation costs nothing here.
Béchamel No. 409Ranhofer's cross-reference is to his own white sauce, a butter-and-flour roux cooked without colour and moistened with milk. Any well-made béchamel of pouring consistency will do. It is added to bind and enrich the cream that the mushrooms have thrown, so start with a few spoonfuls and judge by the gravy.
The three-quarters of an hourForty-five minutes covered is long by modern habit, and with fresh cèpes in good condition it can flatten their texture. The purpose is to draw and concentrate their liquid rather than to tenderise. Twenty to twenty-five minutes over low heat usually reaches the same "succulent" sauce; watch the pan, not the clock.
"Without ceasing to stir"The printed "creasing" is a typographical slip for ceasing. Cream and béchamel reducing together will catch and scorch at the bottom of the pan within a minute if left alone, and scorched cream ruins the whole dish.
A quick ovenRoughly 425–450°F, though the book never fixes a figure. The gratin goes in only to brown the crumbs and set the surface — ten minutes is a maximum, and a broiler for two or three minutes achieves the same thing without over-reducing the sauce underneath.
The bunch of fennelStalks and fronds tied with string, lifted out before serving, in the manner of a bouquet garni. Fennel seed is not a substitute; the fresh herb gives a much lighter anise note.
YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. About a pound of cleaned cèpes will serve four as a vegetable course alongside roast meat, or three as a first course on its own.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is the record of that kitchen: some 3,500 numbered receipts, cross-referenced to one another so that a cook could look up sauce No. 409 without reprinting it. The cèpe section reflects how thoroughly Delmonico's was a French house transplanted — porcini were not a market-garden crop, and are likely to have arrived dried or preserved from Europe, though Boletus edulis grows wild in North America as well. Slow-cooking mushrooms in cream and finishing them au gratin under crumbs is an old provincial French treatment, and cèpes are strongly associated with the southwest and the Bordelais, where they are gathered in autumn, though the cream-and-crumb version cannot be pinned to one region; Ranhofer prints several versions in a row, Provençal, gratinéed, and minced in pastry cases, which is how the book works — a theme stated in variations, so a chef could match the garnish to whatever else was going out that evening.