Selecting and preparing cultivated mushrooms

An exert from Mastering the Art of French Cooking

I am providing this scanned copy of the beginning of the chapter on cultivated mushrooms in Child, Bertolle and Beck’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking because the recipe for Champignons a Blanc provided in a recent post makes reference to ‘the preceding illustrations’.

Leaving aside the directions for how to make fluted caps, I think your average home cook today will find the instructions for how to slice mushrooms somewhat elementary. However, the introduction regarding how to select the mushrooms might be more enlightening. For example, I did not know that you should not be able to see the gills at all, which suggests that most of the mushrooms I have ever purchased in the supermarket have not been very fresh at all.

I must say that I do not agree that mushrooms need to be so thoroughly cleaned, or that they should even come into any contact at with water at all. Indeed, in an article on Girolles the worldwide gourmet goes so far as to say that “Mushrooms must not be washed at all”.

I find it interesting that Child et al. dedicate a chapter to cultivated mushrooms when Julia Child was such a proponent of sourcing the very best ingredients. I was just the other day reading an exert about wild mushrooms in Movida Rustica by Frank Camorra and Richard Cornish where they write:

Wild mushrooms are so different to their shed-raised cousins: they are rich, slippery and give so much more to a dish – almost like nature’s stock cube.

I agree. In my post on chanterelles a blanc I advise that the dish is almost not worth making if you cannot get hold of chanterelles (which will inevitably be wild). Mind you, Child et al. were writing for the average American housewife in the 1960s and took great pains to ensure that the ingredients for their recipes could be easily sourced by this demographic.

Nonetheless, the exert does provide some interesting reading and perhaps the more adventurous among you might even master the art of fluted caps.