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Russian Breakfast Dish
Take a heaping plateful of mushrooms, which have been cleaned, washed and separated from their stems. Put a quarter of a pound of butter in the frying pan (one sliced onion can be added by those who like it), when the butter is melted, put in the mushrooms. Sprinkle them with salt and fry over a moderate fire, turning them and browning on both sides. When the mushrooms are done, pour in a gill of thick sour cream. Let it boil up once, sprinkle with parsley and serve.
A one-pan dish that lives or dies on the sour cream: it goes in at the end and gets one brief boil, no more. Everything else is a matter of translating loose Victorian measures.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. "Thick sour cream" means full-fat cultured cream — light or reduced-fat versions will break the moment they hit the hot pan.
- Boil up once, and only onceSour cream added to a hot pan and held at a boil will curdle into grains and weeping fat. Pull the pan off the heat, stir the cream in, return it just until it bubbles at the edges, then serve immediately.
- A heaping platefulReckon on roughly 1 to 1½ lb of mushrooms, which cooks down to very little. Cremini or a mix of cremini and oyster mushrooms suit the browning the recipe expects; plain white buttons tend to give up their water more readily.
- A quarter pound of butterEight tablespoons for a pound of mushrooms is generous by modern taste. Three or four will brown them perfectly well, and the sour cream supplies the richness.
- Cleaned and washedThe original assumes gritty market or foraged mushrooms. Cultivated ones need only a wipe or a quick rinse and a thorough drying — wet mushrooms steam rather than brown.
- Moderate fire, and don't crowdA medium heat and a wide pan. Mushrooms release liquid first; keep cooking until that liquid has gone and they begin to colour, then let them brown before anything else goes in.
- The stemsDiscarding them entirely is wasteful with cultivated mushrooms. Trim the dry end and slice the rest in with the caps unless they are woody, as shiitake stems are.
- YieldServes three or four as a breakfast or supper dish. It wants something to soak up the cream — buttered toast, dark rye, or boiled potatoes.
This is griby v smetane, mushrooms in sour cream, one of the plainest and most durable dishes in the Russian repertoire, arriving here in an American cookbook. Sour cream — smetana — is the hinge of Russian and Ukrainian cooking, spooned into soups, over dumplings and into pan sauces, and it is thicker and more sharply cultured than most supermarket sour cream sold today. Wild mushrooms were gathered in enormous quantity across northern and eastern Europe and salted or dried for the winter, which is why a "heaping plateful" of them could be assumed rather than costed. That the book files this under breakfast is often taken to reflect a period habit, said to have faded in English-speaking countries, of treating the morning meal as a savoury, hot, cooked affair rather than a sweet or cereal one.