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Sour Cream and Mushrooms
Take a heaping plateful of mushrooms which have been cleaned, washed and separated from their stems and dip them separately in flour. Put a quarter of a pound of butter in the frying pan (one sliced onion can be added by those who like it). When it 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 boil up once, serve.
A simple pan of mushrooms finished with sour cream, filed here among sandwich fillings, which tells you it was meant to be spooned over toast as much as eaten from a dish.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fluid ounces. "Thick sour cream" in this period meant naturally soured heavy cream; full-fat cultured sour cream is the closest current equivalent, and low-fat versions will break.
- Let boil up onceThis is the hinge. Bring the cream just to the point of bubbling and take the pan off the heat. Held at a boil, even full-fat sour cream separates into grains and butterfat.
- A quarter pound of butterOne stick for a plateful of mushrooms is generous by modern taste. Two to three tablespoons will brown the same quantity; the extra was partly there to make a sauce with the cream.
- The flour dredgeToss the caps in flour just before they hit the pan, not in advance, or the flour draws moisture and turns pasty. It also thickens the cream at the end, which is why no other thickener appears.
- Moderate fire, and the water problemMushrooms release liquid before they brown. Work in batches in a wide pan over medium-high heat rather than crowding them, or they steam grey instead of browning on both sides as instructed.
- Which mushroomsThe recipe names no variety; field or cultivated white mushrooms with the stems trimmed off would suit. Cremini or a mix of cultivated mushrooms behave the same way; the stems can go to stock rather than be discarded.
- Yield and servingA heaping plateful is perhaps a pound of mushrooms, enough for four as a side, or piled on four to six rounds of buttered toast.
Mushrooms stewed in soured cream is a dish of the central and eastern European kitchen, and it appears in American cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward. Sour cream here is the older kind: cream left to sour naturally in a cool larder, before commercial culturing and pasteurisation made the tang consistent.