No. 2760

Mushrooms Sauted with Thickened Butter and Broiled Mushrooms on Toast—Mousserons

Champignons Mousserons Sautes au Beurre Lie et Champignons Grilles

Turn one pound of mushroom heads (No. 118); peel the stalks and cut them up into medium-sized pieces. Put some clarified butter in a sautoir, add all the mushrooms, set it on the fire and let cook with salt, lemon juice and white wine. Just when ready to serve add a little bechamel sauce (No. 409); thicken with two egg-yolks and dilute with a gill of cream.

Broiled Mushrooms on Toast.—Choose large, fully opened mushrooms, remove the stems and peel the heads, season with salt and pepper, besmear with oil or melted butter and place them in a hinged gridiron (Fig. 172). Broil on a slow fire and when cooked on one side, turn over. About ten minutes should be sufficient to cook them. Dress on toast, having the rounded sides uppermost, spread over the top partly melted maitre-d'hotel butter (No. 581) and serve hot.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Two preparations from Ranhofer's mushroom chapter: a sauté finished with an egg-and-cream liaison, and simple grilled caps on toast. The first has a point where it can fail; the second is nearly foolproof if the heat stays low.

The liaison is the hingeOnce the two yolks and cream go in, the pan must not boil or even come near it. Pull the sautoir off the heat, whisk the yolks into the gill of cream first, temper with a little of the hot liquid, then return everything over the lowest heat only until it coats a spoon.
A gillFour fluid ounces, half a cup. That much cream with two yolks is a generous liaison for a pound of mushrooms, so add the béchamel sparingly first and judge the consistency.
"Turn" the headsTurning mushrooms means carving shallow spiral flutes into the cap with the tip of a small knife; No. 118 is the cross-reference for the method. It is decorative only, and halved or quartered caps cook and taste the same.
SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow. Use the widest pan you have and do not crowd the mushrooms, or they will steam in their own liquid instead of browning in the clarified butter.
MousseronsStrictly the name means Calocybe gambosa, the St George's mushroom, but Ranhofer applies it loosely across the chapter. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms are what the recipe works with; wild mousserons are a spring mushroom and rarely sold.
Broiling on a slow fireA modern overhead broiler at full blast is nothing like a hinged gridiron over cooling coals. Grill the caps over medium heat, or roast them gills-up at 400F, and give them the ten minutes the recipe asks for so the interior water cooks off.
Maître d'hôtel butterRanhofer's No. 581 is butter creamed with chopped parsley, lemon juice, salt and pepper. "Partly melted" means soft and just beginning to run, not clarified; it should slump over the hot cap rather than pool on the toast.
YieldA pound of mushrooms in the sauté serves four as a garnish or side, two as a course on its own. For the broiled version allow two or three large caps per person.

A Little History

Both preparations come from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of his thirty-odd years as chef at Delmonico's in New York. Ranhofer was cooking at a time when cultivated mushrooms were becoming more reliably available in America: French-style bed culture in cellars and caves spread through the northeastern states in the 1880s and 1890s, turning what had been a foraged luxury into something a large kitchen could order by the pound. The two recipes here show the range that made possible — one an egg liaison and bechamel in the full restaurant manner, the other stripped to a peeled cap, oil, a gridiron and buttered toast. The mousserons in the title is a borrowing from the French market vocabulary Ranhofer wrote in throughout; his cross-references to numbered base preparations, rather than repeated instructions, are what make the book read as a professional's working manual rather than a domestic cookbook.