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Mushrooms-Fried
When peeled put them into hot butter and let them heat thoroughly through-too much cooking- toughens them. Season well with butter, pepper, and salt. Serve on buttered toast; a teaspoon of wine or vinegar on each mushroom is a choice method.
A three-line method that assumes you already have a basket of field mushrooms and a hot pan. The essentials are heat and restraint.
- The hinge: keep it brief"Heat thoroughly through" implies only a few minutes over fairly brisk heat, until the caps have released their juices and just begun to colour. Long stewing in butter is what turns them leathery, exactly as the recipe warns.
- PeelingVictorian cooks peeled the cap skin from large field mushrooms, which are often coarse and grubby. Cultivated button, cremini and portobello caps do not need it; wipe them and trim the stem base. Do peel a large, weathered field mushroom if the skin looks tough.
- Pan and heatUse a wide skillet and do not crowd it. Mushrooms are mostly water, and a full pan drops below frying temperature and simmers them grey. Cook in two batches if needed.
- Butter twiceButter appears again in the seasoning, after the mushrooms have gone into hot butter. The recipe does not say when it goes in, but a knob of fresh butter swirled through at the end is worth doing, since browned butter loses some of that flavour.
- The wine or vinegarA teaspoon per mushroom is generous by modern taste. Start with a tablespoon of sherry, madeira or red wine vinegar for a pound of mushrooms, added at the end so it hisses and reduces rather than stewing.
- ToastUse a sturdy bread that will hold juices without collapsing. Butter it while hot and spoon the mushrooms and their pan liquor over.
- YieldAbout a pound of mushrooms serves two as a supper dish or four as a savoury course.
- If you are foragingThis recipe was written for cooks who knew field mushrooms on sight. Several dangerous species resemble them at the button stage, so anything not identified with certainty by someone competent should not go in the pan.
Fried mushrooms on buttered toast belong to a family of British and American "savouries" and breakfast dishes that leaned on whatever the fields gave up in late summer and autumn. Mushrooms in a household cookbook of the period were often gathered ones, which explains the brisk instruction to peel and the assumption that the cook can judge a good specimen. The splash of wine or vinegar reflects the period's fondness for a sharp note with mushrooms, the same instinct that produced mushroom ketchup and mushroom powder as store-cupboard staples. The recipe appears in The Home Cook Book, a Chicago charity compilation of the 1870s whose recipes were gathered from contributors and printed under loose, chatty headings rather than strict categories.