Welcome back to Cooking With the French Chef, in which I review episodes of Julia Child’s original show, cook out of the new edition of the French Chef Cookbook and share the results with you. Past posts can be found here.
Who likes mushrooms? I love ’em. Portabellos, creminis, buttons, morels, oyster, shiitakes, whatever. Anything but the magic kind. Mushrooms are earthy, hearty, versatile, and part of every culture on earth in some way. It’s hard, for instance, to beat a good dashi. Or an open-faced turkey sandwich. Or Toad-In-the-Hole with mushroom gravy and mashed potatoes. Yum!
Julia, of course, has the French take on mushrooms, and here’s the relevant episode, which originally broadcast on June 15, 1964, the twenty-seventh installment of Season 2:
Granted, from a meal standpoint this might seem a little skimpy, but as we all know, expanding one’s toolbox is never a waste of time, and Julia has a bunch of these focused shows that we’ll be getting into later this year. I think it’s going to be really interesting, of course; after all, you can’t spell fundamental without fun. For that matter, you can’t spell fungus without fun, either.
OK, this is taking a very weird turn. Moving on with our ingredients…
Yep. This is gonna be good. I hope. Since the recipes in this section are pretty easy, I decided to try all three: Sauteed, stewed, and baked under glass. Or, as the French would say, Champignons á Blanc (stewed mushrooms), Champignons Sautés au Beurre (sautéed mushrooms), and Champignons sous Cloche (mushrooms baked under glass).
Naturally, prep came first, and it was remarkably quick and easy. Half the mushrooms got quartered and half of them were sliced.
Yeah, I couldn’t resist trying to flute some of the mushrooms the way Julia said to, and it didn’t go so well. My mushrooms looked like sleazy carnival umbrellas or something. Julia said fluting is something to be practiced and eventually we get the hang of it. Guess I’ll have to keep practicing.
On the other hand, though, I have to be honest: I don’t know how willing I am to interrupt my meal prep to practice a skill I may not need, although the finished product looks cool when done properly.
The portabellos got prepped, too, but Julia was sort of vague about how far she wanted this to go. To scrape out the gills or not to scrape out the gills? My husband thought it would be best to leave them in, and I concurred. As I was getting over bronchitis at the time I made these recipes, I was in no mood to add extra work if I didn’t need to. The gills were left in and the stems got chopped up for the sauté.
Conveniently enough, the two stovetop recipes worked out very nicely because I was able to start the stewed mushrooms and just keep an eye on them while I worked on the sauté. Ingredients at the ready, of course…
The first thing was to add butter and water to the saucepan, then in went the mushrooms. Aside from a bit of seasoning with salt and pepper, all that remained was to stir it occasionally and let it do its thing.
Meanwhile, butter and olive oil went into my skillet for the sautee, followed by the mushrooms, lemon juice, vermouth, and shallots. And yes, I realize my skillet is really old. My newer one was dirty at the time and it was a timing issue.
Anywhoo, these recipes were so low-maintenance that I was done before I knew it and I also got a nice cup of mushroom stock out of the stewing liquid. We used it in won ton soup a few days after I fixed these mushroom recipes.
I was so busy basking in the glow of these nicely cooked mushrooms that I almost forgot I had a third recipe to make. Fortunately, it was also really simple, because it came down to mixing shallots and parsley with softened butter and spooning them into the upturned mushroom caps, followed by a few drops of cream apiece.
What I didn’t anticipate, though, was running out of butter. Julia said to butter crustless slices of toast for the portabellos to sit on, and the only butter I had left was frozen solid. There was nothing else to do but to plunk those puppies on top of slices of frozen butter and hope for the best. Into the oven they went at four hundred degrees Fahrenheit for about fifteen minutes. It was actually good I left the gills in, because they held onto the cream and the mushrooms didn’t leak anything. All that wonderful flavor was kept nicely contained.
The other thing I forgot to do was cover up the mushrooms with a glass bowl, but after what happened to my casserole a few months ago, I honestly didn’t care too much. The only difference a lid would have made was the mushrooms would have steamed a bit more instead of of shriveling, and the bread wouldn’t have toasted as much.
How to serve all these wonderful mushrooms? Julia suggested putting them on toast, which sounded fine, but it also gave me first course vibes, so we had some sausages on the side.
Ét voilá.
The sausages, as it turned out, were completely unnecessary, albeit tasty, because these mushrooms were hearty and filling all by themselves. The stewed mushrooms had a light, sweet flavor, and are probably best when added into a recipe. The sauteed mushrooms were fabulously piquant, with just enough flavor from the shallots to set everything off. Same thing with the Portabellos, although in that case the flavor was almost too light–we ended up sprinkling some Himalayan pink salt on them.
Would I make these recipes again? Maybe. I think my sauteed mushrooms have more flavor, but again, this was about expanding the toolbox, and anything that helps to that end is a real good thing.
We’ll talk more about mushrooms tomorrow in this month’s Club 15 post, so if anyone hasn’t subscribed to the paid tier but wants to, please keep scrolling for a link. Hope to see you all then…
The French Chef Cookbook, The French Chef, Volume One (DVD) and The French Chef, Volume 2 (DVD) are available to own from Amazon.
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