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French Fried Mushrooms
Select good-sized mushrooms. Use the stems for a mushroom sauce or soup. Peel the caps, dust with salt and finish as for French fried onions. Serve on toast with cream or tomato sauce as the main dish at luncheon or supper, or use as a garnish to broiled steak, broiled or creamed chicken or veal cutlet.
A recipe that leans on a neighbouring one: "finish as for French fried onions" means dip the caps in milk or beaten egg, dredge in flour or fine crumbs, and fry in deep fat until golden. A few details are worth spelling out.
- The frying itselfDeep fat, hot enough to brown quickly (a modern cook would work around 350-375F); fry one layer at a time so the temperature does not crash, and drain on paper the moment they colour. The original gives neither temperature nor time.
- Skip the peelingPeeling was standard when mushrooms came in gritty and field-grown. Cultivated white or cremini caps only need a wipe with a damp cloth, and the skin holds the cap together in the fat.
- Salt late, not earlySalting the peeled caps draws out water, which is the enemy of a crisp coating. Salt them after frying, or salt the flour instead.
- Dry caps, dry coatingMushrooms are mostly water and will steam their own crust soft if wet when they go into the batter. Pat them dry, coat, and fry at once rather than letting them sit breaded.
- Size and choiceThe recipe says only 'good-sized', leaving the cook to judge; large cultivated caps are the obvious modern choice. Very large portobello caps can be halved or quartered and will need longer in the fat.
- The stemsThe instruction to save them is sound practice, not thrift for its own sake. Stems are tougher and more fibrous than caps and give better body to a sauce or soup.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; the cook must judge by whether the mushrooms are the main dish on toast or a garnish alongside steak or cutlets.
Deep-fried mushrooms belong to a period when cultivated mushrooms had just become reliably available to town households. Commercial mushroom growing in cellars, caves and purpose-built houses expanded sharply in Europe and the United States through the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the early twentieth a cook writing for a general audience could assume readers would find good-sized caps at market rather than gathering them. The cross-reference to French fried onions is characteristic of those cookbooks of the era that organised by technique rather than by dish, though plenty of books of the same date were arranged by dish or by ingredient instead: once a reader had mastered dipping, dredging and deep fat, the same method was applied down a list of vegetables. The suggestion to serve them on toast as the main dish at luncheon or supper reflects the structure of the day's meals in such books, where the substantial meat dinner sat apart from two lighter meals that leaned heavily on vegetables, eggs and things served on toast.