Mushrooms on toast

We are at the dining room table.  The Irish is reading aloud to me snippets of the Sunday paper while smoking silver salmon with apple chips.  Mmmmm....Our friend Jim is coming over for a BBQ today.  We hope we will be able to sit outside although the mosquitoes are atrocious.

So I must be recovering from working 80 hours a week for the past 18 months as I have been musing about mushrooms on toast.  It has long been popular in the UK and I used to think yuck, how unappezing.  All the Miss Marples, Poirots, Wimseys, Harry Potters and all the others eating mushrooms on toast for supper. Remember how hobbits turn absolutely bloodthirsty about mushrooms and how they risk life and limb for the delectable  mushrooms in Farmer Maggott's field?  JRR Tolkien had to get that from somewhere and now we find out there is a long love affair with this humble vegetable.

Those of you who know me know I love to cook, but the Irish has actually been doing most of it for a long time now.  Anyway, one night a few weeks ago we had some leftover mushrooms and I made toast and tried it and lo- it was delicious. 

Apparently it is a bona-fide dish, made even more famous by the famous cook Jane Grigson, who celebrates each ingredient - in this case field mushrooms.  Here she reprints a recipe from  Shilling Cookery for the People, first published in 1854 by Alexis Soyer, the great chef of the Reform Club.

'Being in Devonshire, at the end of September and walking across the fields before breakfast to a small farmhouse I found three very fine mushrooms, which I thought would be a treat, but on arriving at the house I found it had no oven, a bad gridiron and a smoky coal fire.  Necessity, they say, is the mother of Invention, I immediately applied to our grand and universal mama, how I should dress my precious mushrooms, when a gentle whisper came to my ear...'

Soyer cooked them on toast, on a stand close up to the fire, with a glass tumbler inverted over them to keep off the taint of the coal smoke.  It also kept in all the delicious juices.  Here is his method adapted to our happier circumstances.

Wipe the mushrooms, which should be fine large ones, and remove the earthy part of the stalk.  Place them, stalks up, on rounds of toast which have been spread with clotted cream.  Season them and put a little more cream onto the caps.  Arrange toast and mushrooms on a baking sheet, and invert onehuge or several small Pyrex dishes over them.  Leave for half an hour in a fairly hot oven. 375-400 degrees.

'The sight when the glass is removed, is most inviting, its whiteness rivals the everlasting snows of Mt. Blanc, and the taste is worthy of Lucullus.  Vitellius would never have dines without it; Apicius would never have gone to Greece to seek for crawfish; and had he only half the fortune left when he committed suicide, he would have preferred to have left proud Rome and retire to some villa or cottage to enjoy such an enticing dish.'

I wonder what 'the People' made of such learned flights of culinary fantasy, and hope it did not put them off the recipe, which is the ideal way of treating our precious field mushroom.

-Jane Grigson     English Food