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Fresh Mushrooms
Peel a dozen medium-sized mushrooms, remove the stems, melt a teaspoonful of butter in the cutlet dish and before it gets too hot, lift the dish off and put it on a plate. Cover the bottom of the dish with mushrooms; on top of each mushroom put a bit of butter the size of a marble; season each with a little salt and pepper. Return the dish to the flame, and cook from two to ten minutes, according to the size of the mushrooms. A little sherry may be sprinkled over them and the addition of half a pint of beef juice squeezed from rump steak.
This is chafing-dish cookery: a dozen mushroom caps cooked in butter at the table, meant to be piled onto toast. Two details need translating — the vessel and the beef juice.
- The cutlet dishA shallow metal dish of the kind sold with chafing-dish and spirit-lamp outfits, rather than a modern lidded casserole; the recipe itself says only "the flame". A small heavy skillet gives the same result over low to medium heat.
- Melt, then pull off the flameLifting the dish onto a plate before the butter browns is the hinge of the method. The caps go into warm rather than sizzling butter so they release their liquid gently and stew in it instead of searing.
- PeelingCultivated white or cremini mushrooms do not need peeling; wipe them and trim the stem. Peeling was routine advice in cookbooks of the era, and may reflect the tougher skins of larger field mushrooms.
- Butter the size of a marbleAbout a teaspoon per cap, so roughly four tablespoons in total on top of the teaspoon in the pan. That is generous by modern habit but it is what makes the pan juices worth mopping up.
- Two to ten minutesSmall button caps are done in two or three minutes; large flat caps three or four inches across take the full ten. They are ready when the caps have slumped and given up their liquid.
- The beef juice"Beef juice squeezed from rump steak" is raw expressed meat juice, pressed from steak in a meat press and never cooked. Leave it out. If you want the savoury depth it was there to supply, reduce a half cup of good beef stock in the pan at the end.
- SherryA tablespoon or two of dry sherry; the recipe says only "a little" and gives no timing. Added near the end, some of the alcohol will cook off, though not all. A sweet cream sherry will read as cloying against the butter.
- YieldA dozen medium caps serve two as a savoury, or four as a small first course. The recipe does not say how to serve them; buttered toast is a natural vehicle, and worth spooning the pan butter over.
This entry belongs to the American chafing-dish vogue of the 1890s and 1900s, when a spirit lamp and a set of nickel or copper dishes were often said to be a standard wedding present and hostesses cooked oysters, welsh rarebit and mushrooms in front of their guests. Mushrooms suited the fashion because they cook in minutes and need almost nothing done to them, and because commercial mushroom growing in cellars and caves was, around roughly this period, beginning to make them a reliable market item rather than a seasonal forage. The beef juice is a period fingerprint of a different kind: pressed raw meat juice was a staple of invalid and convalescent cookery in the nineteenth century, sold in bottled form and reportedly recommended by doctors, and cookbooks of the era reached for it as a concentrated savoury flavouring much as a later cook would reach for a bouillon cube.