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Creamed Mushrooms
Chopped Wash and stem mushrooms. Remove the peeling if it seems tough. Melt in a saucepan about 2 tablespoonfuls of butter for every half pound of mushrooms. Add the mushrooms, cover tightly and cook over a low fire 10 minutes. Dredge lightly with flour, season with salt and pepper and cover with thin cream. Cook five minutes longer and serve on toast.
A straightforward pan of mushrooms in cream, written when cooks were assumed to know how much flour "lightly" meant. The proportions work out to roughly 2 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon flour and about 1/2 cup cream per half pound of mushrooms.
- Don't wash themThe instruction to wash reflects a time when mushrooms arrived with real dirt and sometimes with manure from the growing bed. Cultivated mushrooms today only need wiping with a damp cloth; soaked caps release water in the pan and dilute the sauce.
- Peeling"Remove the peeling if it seems tough" applies to large open-cap field mushrooms, whose skin can be leathery. Button and cremini mushrooms need nothing removed; only the stem base, if woody, is worth trimming.
- Covered low cookingTen minutes covered over low heat steams the mushrooms in their own liquid rather than browning them. That is deliberate here and gives a pale, juicy result. If you prefer flavour over colour-matching the original, cook uncovered over higher heat until the released liquid boils off, then proceed.
- "Thin cream"Period cream was sold in grades by richness, thin being the pouring grade rather than the whipping one; light cream is the closest modern equivalent, half-and-half a leaner substitute. Heavy cream works and thickens faster; whole milk will need more flour to hold together.
- Dredge and cook out the flourThe five minutes after the cream goes in is the hinge. It is the only chance the flour gets to cook, so keep it at a bare simmer for the full time or the sauce tastes pasty.
- SeasoningThe original seasons after the mushrooms have already given up their liquid. A grating of nutmeg or a spoon of sherry at the end is a plausible addition.
- YieldA pound of mushrooms serves three or four on toast as a light supper dish, or six as a vegetable alongside meat. Toast the bread firm enough that it does not collapse under the sauce.
Creamed vegetables on toast were a fixture of American middle-class cooking from the late nineteenth century into the mid-twentieth, and mushrooms were the luxurious end of that range. Commercial mushroom growing in the United States expanded sharply in the decades around 1900, much of it in southeastern Pennsylvania, which turned what had been a forager's find or a hothouse curiosity into something a city household could buy by the half pound. Household books of the period lean toward dishes that stretch a small amount of an expensive ingredient over toast into a full course. The advice to peel the caps is a reminder that the mushrooms of the period were often large, mature and open-gilled rather than the tight white buttons that later dominated the market.