Eat: Mushroom Bruschetta That Can Carry a Meal

William Brinson for The New York Times; Food stylist: Suzanne Lenzer. Prop stylist: Maeve Sheridan.

The waitress placed a steak knife on the table, and everyone's eyebrows went up. No one had ordered steak. There was an appetizer course coming. We didn't need a steak knife.

"It's for the mushrooms," she explained.

The restaurant was Balena in Chicago, a soaring room in Lincoln Park across the street from the Steppenwolf Theater. It serves the Italian food that is invariably called rustic but that is really refined: house-cured salumi, wood-fired pizzas, involved pastas and rotisserie meats.

The mushrooms arrived: a deep pile of creminis, roasted and cream-slicked, on top of a wide slab of grilled rye bread. Golden ribbons of caramelized onion peeked out from beneath them. The whole plate seemed to gleam.

Eyebrows went up around the table again. In New York, an appetizer like this would have been the size of an iPhone. Here it resembled a strip steak. Pair it with a watercress salad, and you have a meal in itself.

Which is just what the plan is now: Balena's bruschetta for dinner, as April's showers give way to the loamy scent of May and fresh, wildish mushrooms start popping up at markets courtesy of cultivators and foragers alike. It is a supersize take on a grand old French recipe, champignons à la crème, served on toast.

Balena's chef and one of its owners, Chris Pandel, a son of Chicago who served his apprenticeship in New York cooking for Andrew Carmellini at Café Boulud, gave me the recipe. Extensive experimentation in a Brooklyn home kitchen suggests the dish can be made almost as well as his cooks pull it off in Chicago, though if you have access to a wood-burning oven in which to roast the mushrooms, you may well match the original for smokiness.

Start by making the caramelized onions. These take a great deal of time. As Tom Scocca wrote in Slate some time ago, "Browning onions is a matter of patience." Scocca was sick of recipes that did not make this point. His article was a rant against recipe writers who do not tell the truth: "Soft, dark brown onions in five minutes. That is a lie. Fully caramelized onions in five minutes more. Also a lie." The onions here, barely slicked with neutral oil, surrounded by sweet wine, can take up to 30 minutes to achieve the excellence you are looking for. You stir and stir and stir.

"The simple things always take a lot of time," Pandel said. "But it's worth it for the nuttiness you get at the end, when the onions begin to turn toward dark."

Mushrooms next: Agaricus bisporus, the common mushrooms known at various points of their growth as white or button mushrooms, or champignons. These become creminis or baby bellas as they grow. Eventually they are portobellos. Handle them with care, whatever their name. "It's important to learn how to clean mushrooms without really getting them wet," Pandel said. You can get most of the dirt off them with your fingers, brushing their caps and stems softly. If water is necessary, make it ice-cold and use it sparingly, then dry the mushrooms quickly and gently with a paper towel.

Pan-roasting the mushrooms takes nearly as much time as the onions. The process is fascinating. The mushrooms absorb the cooking fats almost immediately, then exude it after their water has been evaporated by the heat. (Be careful not to overcrowd them in the pan.) Like the onions, they will eventually begin to caramelize and achieve a velvety texture. Shallots and thyme add depth to the mushrooms. Cream only adds to this effect. You want a loose mixture. It should look rich as sin.

For the toast, Pandel uses rye from a recipe by Balena's former bread maker, Peter Becker. It is substantial and sour, impressively dense, and holds up brilliantly to the fire in their grill. Its taste is a perfect counterpoint to the sweetness of the onions, the mushrooms, the cream. Still, a store-bought version toasted beneath the broiler worked exceedingly well at home. Make sure that you slice it thick, so that the bread has bulk enough to hold up to its topping.

I served one or two pieces per person alongside a thatch of watercress dressed sparingly with vinaigrette, and you may wish to do the same — though smaller, New York-style portions would work as appetizers if you prefer. The steak knife is necessary in only the first case.

Endeavor, whatever you do, to cook the food for someone attractive. Champignons à la crème has magical powers, Jane Grigson intimates in her invaluable guide to fungi cookery, "The Mushroom Feast," published in 1975. Grigson recalls a grand old French film featuring Françoise Rosay as a wealthy, older woman conspiring with her maid to seduce a handsome, younger man. How? The maid cooks champignons à la crème for dinner. And that, Grigson wrote, was the end for him.

"I am not sure which was the major attraction," she writes. "Probably, being a French film, the mushrooms — together they were irresistible."

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