Button Mushroom

In The All American Wine & Cheese Book, food writer Laura Werlin named Lively Run’s fresh goat cheese as one of the two best chèvres in the country. A concentrated burst of blue cheese flavor adds zest to an appetizer created by Steve and Suzanne Messmer of Lively Run.

Here is a simple way to enjoy big Paris mushrooms. I like chanterelles, morels, and even matsutakes, but these common white mushrooms—the kind you see in supermarkets—remind me of culinary school; they smell like la bonne cuisine française. We use banker watch–size mushrooms—as big as you can find. If you’re looking for an upscale alternative, porcini will also work. This dish is best prepared in a cast-iron frying pan, served family style at the table. Bring it out hot and bubbling.

On their own, roasted mushrooms are golden, buttery, and delicious, but we've gone a step further and jazzed them up by showering them with a blanket of crunchy, chile-flecked breadcrumbs.

How to get great flavor out of ordinary white mushrooms? Add a handful of dried porcini. You will not believe the difference.

The name refers to “hunter’s style,” whatever that is supposed to mean. I doubt that hunters in Italy, or anywhere else, ever carried all these ingredients, but this is a traditional southern Italian dish. This is a far better version than those popularized in the sixties, which were essentially chicken with canned tomato sauce. This is great with bread, even better with a simple risotto (page 521).

Like coq au vin, this is a slow recipe that takes careful attention to a couple of ingredients: the bacon must be good slab bacon, nice and smoky and not too lean, and the wine should be fruity and worthy of drinking (there are Burgundies and American Pinot Noirs that meet this requirement and cost around ten bucks a bottle). By all means make this a day or two in advance if you like, then refrigerate and skim the fat if that’s your preference. Reheating will take only about 15 minutes. New potatoes, roasted in olive oil or butter, are terrific alongside this stew, but so is crusty bread. Round things out with a steamed vegetable or salad.

What I suggest here—since most of us don’t have access to truly wild mushrooms—is a combination of dried porcini with fresh shiitakes and white (button) mushrooms. Serve this with buttered noodles, a risotto (even Bare-Bones Risotto, page 522, would be great), or crisp bread. Other cuts of meat you can use here: boneless pork shoulder, veal shoulder, or beef chuck or brisket (which will require somewhat longer cooking time).

This is a mild, rich side dish, one that can double as a sauce for buttered noodles or rice (it can be served on toast too). With chanterelles or other wild mushrooms, it’s a dream, but even with button mushrooms it’s super. If you have spring onions, this is the place to use them; otherwise, leeks are a great substitute.

Quicker and easier than the preceding recipe, this one usually relies on mushrooms and meat for flavor. Though it’s a cross-cultural technique and not at all traditional, I think adding a small handful of soaked dried porcini to the fresh mushrooms as they cook is a big improvement. You can buy toasted sesame seeds in Korean (and usually Japanese) markets, but toasting them yourself takes less than 5 minutes.

When my grandmother was a girl, this was a staple winter dish, and it still is in Poland and much of the rest of Eastern Europe. You might think of porcini as Italian or French, but good dried mushrooms, including porcini, come out of Poland to this day.

Like many dishes from India, this one contains a lot of ingredients and requires a fair amount of precooking work but is easy to assemble. If you can find fresh paneer—the simple cheese that appears in many Indian dishes—by all means use it. But tofu makes a great substitute. Serve over rice or as part of a larger Indian meal.

This “caviar,” most commonly spread on toast, is little more than sautéed mushrooms, but with an unusual texture and a decidedly Russian character. Do not mince the mushrooms too finely or they will become pasty.

A staple of many tapas bars, and among the most elementary of appetizers, this is a surefire crowd pleaser—as long as your crowd isn’t vegetarian. Even if some members are, you can skewer plain mushrooms or mushrooms and other vegetables—like red peppers and zucchini, for example.

A deluxe version of sautéed mushrooms, often served on small plates in tapas bars. This is a wonderful starter for a sitdown dinner, but be sure to serve it with plenty of bread; you will want it to sop up the sauce.

This is the quintessential Italian American dish: from the 1950s through the 1980s, every Italian restaurant had it on the menu. It is still one of America’s favorite dishes and is easy to make. The important part of the recipe is to begin cooking the meat and mushrooms separately, then combine them at the end so the flavors blend. Marsala is the special ingredient in this dish. Around the city of Marsala, Malvasia, a varietal of a very aromatic grape, grew in abundance. Wine has been made from this varietal for centuries, and the English took note of it and began importing it. The history of England and the New World needs no retelling, and this is most likely how Marsala made it across the pond. When the Sicilian immigrants settled in America, and rediscovered it, it was a natural reunion.

As a child, I had salads in the winter that Nonna Rosa would dress with the flavorful fat rendered from pancetta or prosciutto scraps and a splash of homemade vinegar. The greens were always the tougher winter kinds, like chicory or escarole, and sometimes she even added slices of boiled potatoes, still warm. So, when I had my first spinach salad in America dressed with warm bacon pieces, I assumed my grandma’s salad made with spinach was the American/Italian way.

GINA Set out a unique dip to get this cheer rolling in! No one ever really expects you to go to the trouble of making something as special as a warm crab dip—but they sure are happy if you do. It adds a festive, caring quality to the party in the same way a great piece of jewelry can make a whole outfit special.

The sauce for this dish can be made a day or two ahead (keep the bacon separate) and refrigerated. Gently reheat as the pasta boils; add the bacon to the sauce during the last few minutes of heating.

Like the asparagus tart that’s a harbinger of spring (see page 69), this mushroom-topped variation is a crowd-pleaser. It makes a lovely dinner, or, when cut into bite-size pieces, a perfect hors d’oeuvre for a cocktail party.

Browning the chicken seals in the juices and keeps the inside moist and flavorful. This recipe can be made with pork cutlets instead of chicken. For an earthier flavor, substitute shiitake, cremini, or wild mushrooms for the white mushrooms.

Miso is a common ingredient in vegan versions of cheesey recipes, because it helps make up for the sharp complexity that’s missing without any dairy products. I love cheese too much to ever leave it out, so why choose? Combining the two together, and adding mushrooms, makes for a powerfully flavored dish that packs a punch of umami. This is a light dinner for one that you can bulk up with a salad.

In classic French cooking, each dish has a name that indicates its precise ingredients and correct garnish. Bourguignonne is a term for dishes cooked in red wine, as some of the most famous French wines are from Bourgogne (Burgundy). These dishes are garnished with pearl onions, button mushrooms, and lardons of bacon. Never choose stew meat already in precut cubes. It’s more expensive and you have no idea if you’re getting, for example, leftover bits from the shoulder or rib-eye, two wildly different cuts that won’t cook at the same rate.

This soup is for mushroom maniacs, although if you’re on the fence about them, I guarantee this soup will sway you! There’s simply no taste in the culinary world that mimics mushrooms, and that flavor is backed up by a host of health-supportive properties. Between the shiitakes, the barley, and the rich broth, this is a warming meal in a bowl. Since the barley must soak overnight, you’ll need to plan ahead.