Important: Safety Warning

This page offers rules for telling edible mushrooms from poisonous ones. No such rules are reliable, and these identifications predate modern mycology. Deadly species closely resemble edible ones, and mistakes are regularly fatal. Never eat a wild mushroom on the strength of this text.

This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.

No. 2757

Mushrooms a la Dumas—Oronges

Champignons Oronges a la Dumas

Remove the skin from some oronges; mince finely and fry in oil; when the moisture has all evaporated, season and drain in a colander. Put some fresh oil in the pan, add to it parsley and a clove of garlic and afterward the drained oronges with the addition of a little salt and cayenne pepper; dress on a baking dish, dredge over bread-crumbs to cover and push into the oven. Turn eighteen whole mushroom oronges, having them an inch and three-quarters in diameter; chop up the stalks with the removed parts from the inside. Have a sautoir on the fire, set into it a quarter of a pound of butter with as much oil; in this fry colorless four finely chopped and blanched shallots, a clove of garlic, the chopped oronges and a heaping tablespoonful of chopped parsley; when there is no more moisture, add half a pint of espagnole sauce (No. 414). Remove the garlic, stuff the whole oronges with this preparation, bestrew with bread-crumbs, pour butter over and place them in a baking pan; moisten with mushroom liquor and cook in a moderate oven for twenty minutes, and garnish the baked preparation around with these.

← No. 2756 Mushrooms a la Raynal—Mousserons Mushrooms & Truffles No. 2758 Mushrooms a la Rivera—Morils →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer builds this in two parts: a minced mushroom duxelles gratinated in a dish, ringed with eighteen stuffed caps. The instructions assume a professional brigade and a pantry of mother sauces, so most of the work of modernising is filling in what he left unsaid.

What an oronge isOronge is the French name for Amanita caesarea, Caesar's mushroom, a golden-orange amanita prized in France and Italy. It is not sold in North American markets and it has lethal look-alikes in the same genus; unless you are buying it from an Italian importer, do not go looking for it in the woods.
A workable substituteLarge cremini or white button caps of about 1 3/4 inches take the stuffing well and behave the same way in the pan. Fresh porcini are another option if you can get them.
The hinge: drive off the water firstBoth preparations depend on cooking the minced mushrooms until there is genuinely no moisture left. Add the espagnole to wet mushrooms and the stuffing slumps out of the caps and the gratin turns to soup.
"Turn" the mushroomsTourner here means fluting the caps with a small knife in a spiral pattern, a garnish technique. It is decorative only; hollowing the caps and trimming the stalks flush is all the recipe structurally needs.
Espagnole sauceRanhofer's No. 414 is a long-cooked brown sauce built on roux, veal stock and mirepoix. Half a pint is one cup. A reduced, well-seasoned brown veal or beef stock thickened lightly with beurre manie stands in without the two-day commitment.
Sautoir and measuresA sautoir is a straight-sided saute pan. A quarter of a pound of butter is one stick, 4 oz, paired with an equal volume of oil.
Mushroom liquorThe strained cooking liquid from earlier mushroom preparations, kept as a pantry staple in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Use the soaking liquid from dried porcini, or a light mushroom stock, and only enough to film the bottom of the pan.
Oven and timeRanhofer's "moderate oven" is usually read as somewhere around 350F. Twenty minutes browns the crumbs and heats the stuffing through; the recipe gives the gratinated mince no time of its own, and ten to fifteen minutes alongside is a reasonable guess.
YieldEighteen caps around a central gratin serves six as a first course, or three as a supper dish.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is the record of that kitchen at its height, several thousand numbered recipes cross-referencing one another exactly as this one calls out No. 414 for its espagnole. The dedication is almost certainly to Alexandre Dumas pere, whose posthumous Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine (1873) had made the novelist a recognised authority on the table, and whose name attached to a dish signalled a certain generous, garlicky French appetite. The mushroom itself, the oronge or Caesar's amanita, carries its own weight of history: the name is generally traced to the Latin aurantium for its orange cap, and the mushroom Roman writers praised as boletus is usually identified with this species. That Ranhofer could specify eighteen of them, of a particular diameter, says a good deal about what a Manhattan luxury kitchen could source in the 1890s.