Duxelles

Duxelles is a finely chopped (minced) mixture of mushrooms or mushroom stems, onions, shallots, and herbs sautéed in butter, and reduced to a paste. Cream is sometimes used as well. It is a basic preparation used in stuffings and sauces (notably, beef Wellington) or as a garnish. Duxelles can also be filled into a pocket of raw pastry and baked as a savory tart.

Duxelles is made with any cultivated or wild mushroom, depending on the recipe. Duxelles made with wild porcini mushrooms will be much stronger flavored than that made with white or brown mushrooms.

Duxelles is said to have been created by the 17th-century French chef François Pierre La Varenne (1615–1678) and to have been named after his employer, Nicolas Chalon du Blé, marquis d'Uxelles, maréchal de France.

Many classical cookbooks define duxelles as dehydrated fungi, used as stuffings and pastry fillings. According to Auguste Escoffier (1847–1935), a world-renowned French chef regarded as the father of classical cuisine, the mushrooms were dehydrated in order to enhance flavor and minimize water content. When fresh mushrooms are cooked, they let off enormous amounts of vapor in relation to their size. Fresh mushrooms used as stuffings or pastry fillings could therefore build up pressure inside the dish or pastry, causing it to crack or even explode.

Beef Wellington

Beef Wellington is a preparation of fillet steak coated with pâté (often pâté de foie gras) and duxelles, which is then wrapped in puff pastry and baked. Some recipes include wrapping the coated meat in a crêpe to retain the moisture and prevent it from making the pastry soggy.

A whole tenderloin may be wrapped and baked, and then sliced for serving, or the tenderloin may be sliced into individual portions prior to wrapping and baking. Many spices may be added to enhance the flavour; some examples are allspice and ginger.

Naming

Origin

The origin of the name is unclear, with no definite connection to Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington.

Leah Hyslop, writing in The Telegraph, observes that by the time Wellington became famous, meat baked in pastry was a well-established part of English cuisine, and that the dish's similarity to the French filet de bœuf en croûte (fillet of beef in pastry) might imply that "Beef Wellington" was a "timely patriotic rebranding of a trendy continental dish". However, she cautions, there are no 19th century recipes for the dish. There is a mention of "fillet of beef, a la Wellington" in The Los Angeles Times of 1903, but the first occurrence of the dish itself is in the Oxford English Dictionary which cites a 1939 New York food guide with "Tenderloin of Beef Wellington" which is cooked, left to cool and rolled in a pie crust.

Mushroom

A mushroom (or toadstool) is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground on soil or on its food source.

The standard for the name "mushroom" is the cultivated white button mushroom, Agaricus bisporus; hence the word "mushroom" is most often applied to those fungi (Basidiomycota, Agaricomycetes) that have a stem (stipe), a cap (pileus), and gills (lamellae, sing. lamella) on the underside of the cap. These gills produce microscopic spores that help the fungus spread across the ground or its occupant surface.

"Mushroom" describes a variety of gilled fungi, with or without stems, and the term is used even more generally, to describe both the fleshy fruiting bodies of some Ascomycota and the woody or leathery fruiting bodies of some Basidiomycota, depending upon the context of the word.

Forms deviating from the standard morphology usually have more specific names, such as "bolete", "puffball", "stinkhorn", and "morel", and gilled mushrooms themselves are often called "agarics" in reference to their similarity to Agaricus or their place Agaricales. By extension, the term "mushroom" can also designate the entire fungus when in culture; the thallus (called a mycelium) of species forming the fruiting bodies called mushrooms; or the species itself.