Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › To Stew Mushrooms
To Stew Mushrooms
Miss Brokovski.
Peel them and put them to stew in some milk till tender, when sufficiently done, put to them some butter and flour mixed together, a little cayenne, and some salt; part cream instead of milk will improve them.
A plain nineteenth-century mushroom stew, thickened with kneaded butter and flour rather than a cooked roux. The recipe gives no quantities at all, so the proportions below are the working ones.
- QuantitiesFor 1 lb of mushrooms, start with about 1 cup of milk (or half milk, half cream), and use 1 tablespoon soft butter kneaded with 1 tablespoon flour. That is enough to serve four as a side or on toast.
- PeelingVictorian cooks peeled field and cultivated mushrooms because the caps were often gritty and the skins tough. Modern button, cremini or portobello caps need only a wipe; scrape the gills of large flat mushrooms if they look dusty, and trim the stem base.
- Butter and flour mixed togetherThis is beurre manié, not a roux. Work the soft butter and flour to a smooth paste and whisk it into the simmering milk in small pieces, letting each melt before adding the next, or the sauce goes lumpy.
- Timing"Till tender" is 8 to 10 minutes at a gentle simmer, not longer. Mushrooms release a good deal of liquid in the first few minutes, so the pan will look thin before it thickens.
- Do not boil after the creamOnce the beurre manié and cream are in, hold the pan just below a simmer for two or three minutes to cook out the raw flour. A hard boil risks curdling the cream.
- Cayenne and saltTake the 'little cayenne' as a bare pinch, roughly 1/8 teaspoon for the quantity above. Salt at the end: the mushrooms give up their own liquid and the sauce concentrates.
- ServingIt suits buttered toast or a place beside a roast, and it also makes a filling for vol-au-vent cases.
- If using wild mushrooms"Mushrooms" in 1877 often meant field mushrooms gathered by the household. Only cook wild fungi you have identified with certainty; several dangerous species resemble young field mushrooms closely.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Toronto in 1877 by "the ladies of Toronto and chief cities and towns in Canada," and it is generally regarded as the first substantial Canadian community cookbook — the model for the thousands of church-and-charity fundraising collections that followed. The collection's origins were less straightforward than that credit suggests: a good deal of it was lifted from earlier American compilations, so a credited entry such as this one, given to Miss Brokovski and printed with no quantities and no yield, cannot safely be taken as a contributor's own unedited words. Cultivated mushrooms were still a luxury in the 1870s, grown under glass or in cellars, so a household recipe like this one most likely began with field mushrooms picked in late summer pasture. Stewing them in milk and finishing with cream and a bare touch of cayenne is often said to be a characteristic British treatment of the period, and it survived almost unchanged into the twentieth century as creamed mushrooms on toast.