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Mushrooms and Cream
(Northern France.) Clean and trim 1 pound of fresh mushrooms, fry them in 1 ounce of butter, adding pepper and salt, cooking 6 minutes. Add 2 tablespoonfuls of white stock, some parsley, and 1/2 cup of cream. Cook 4 minutes longer, and pour over slices of toast.
A ten-minute mushroom saute finished with cream, from a 1902 American traveller's collection of continental dishes. The proportions are sound; only the pan technique needs a modern eye.
- Dry pan first, butter secondOne ounce of butter is about 2 tablespoons, which will not go far in a crowded pan of mushrooms. Cook the mushrooms in a wide pan over fairly high heat until their water has boiled off and they begin to colour, then add the butter. Otherwise the six minutes produces grey, stewed mushrooms.
- White stockVeal or chicken stock made without browning the bones, so it stays pale. Any light chicken stock works; two tablespoons is a deglazing splash, not a sauce base.
- CreamHalf a cup of heavy cream (36 percent or more) is the safest reading. Lighter cream is liable to stay thin over only four minutes of reduction. If the sauce is still loose at the end, keep it on the heat another minute rather than adding flour.
- Which mushroomsCultivated champignons de Paris were widely available in northern France by 1900, and ordinary white button mushrooms suit the recipe well, though the text says only 'fresh mushrooms' and field or wild mushrooms are not ruled out. Quarter them or slice them thickly; a pound sliced paper-thin will collapse.
- CleaningWipe or briefly rinse and dry thoroughly. Mushrooms that go into the pan wet will steam rather than brown, and the recipe gives no time for the extra water to cook off.
- SeasoningSalt draws water out, so hold most of it back until the mushrooms have browned. The parsley goes in at the end with the cream, not earlier, where it would darken and lose its point.
- Yield and toastServes two as a light supper or four as a first course. Use firm white bread, toasted dry and hot; anything soft turns to paste under the cream.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea (1902) belongs to a genre of American cookbooks that collected regional European dishes for home cooks who would never travel to eat them, and the terse attribution "Northern France" is doing the work of a whole paragraph of description. Mushrooms in cream on toast is a fixture of French home cooking rather than a named restaurant dish, close kin to the champignons a la creme that appear in French household manuals of the same period. The cultivated white mushroom itself was very much a Paris product: growers had been raising them in the disused limestone quarries and cave systems under and around the city since the early nineteenth century, which is why the button mushroom is still called the champignon de Paris in French.