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Fresh Mushrooms with Butter
Cut away the end of stems of a pound white, sound, fresh mushrooms; peel, wash and drain well on a cloth. Heat an ounce of butter in a frying pan, add the mushrooms, season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper; gently toss them, cover and fry for ten minutes tossing them once in a while. Have six freshly prepared toasts on a hot dish and evenly divide the mushrooms over. Squeeze the juice of quarter of a lemon into the pan, lightly mix and pour over the mushrooms, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A plain sauté that lives or dies on how much water the pan is carrying. The original's covered ten minutes will steam rather than brown, so decide which result you want before you start.
- Skip the peelingPeeling was standard when mushrooms came in gritty and field-grown; cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need only the dry stem end trimmed. Peeling now costs you flavour and texture for nothing.
- Washing and dryingIf you do wash, do it fast in a colander and dry thoroughly on a cloth as directed. Wet mushrooms in the pan will boil in their own liquid and never take colour.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is a half teaspoon of pepper for a pound of mushrooms. That is assertive by modern taste; a quarter teaspoon is closer to what most cooks want.
- Butter and pan sizeAn ounce of butter is two tablespoons, which is lean for a pound of mushrooms. Use a wide pan so they sit in one layer, and add a little more butter at the end rather than the beginning.
- The covered ten minutesCovering traps the moisture the mushrooms release, giving something closer to stewed than fried. For browning, cook uncovered over fairly high heat for eight to ten minutes until the liquid has gone and the edges catch; salt near the end rather than at the start.
- The lemon in the panThe lemon goes into the hot pan after the mushrooms come out, picking up the browned juices. Keep the pan on the heat for a few seconds, swirl, and pour immediately, or it turns thin and sour.
- ToastSix pieces of toast to a pound of mushrooms works out to a modest portion each. As a first course or savoury it serves six; as a light supper dish, three.
Mushrooms on toast belongs to the English savoury tradition, the small hot dish served at the end of a formal dinner or as a breakfast and supper standby, and it is often said to have travelled into American hotel and restaurant cooking largely through that route. Its appearance in a general international collection reflects a real change in supply: through the nineteenth century mushrooms were mostly gathered, pickled or turned into ketchup, but cave and shed cultivation around Paris and later in the United States made sound white mushrooms a reliable market item, which is why the recipe can begin by simply assuming a pound of them. The instruction to peel is sometimes traced to the era of field-gathered fungi, when the skin carried soil and the cook had no way of knowing what the mushroom had grown through, though cookbooks went on telling cooks to peel cultivated mushrooms well into the twentieth century. The finish of lemon juice swirled in the pan and parsley scattered over follows what is generally regarded as a characteristic French treatment of the period, brightening a dish that is otherwise butter and fungus and very little else.