Wild Mushroom Ragout

In his San Francisco restaurant Stars, Jeremiah Tower serves a good dish of mixed wild mushrooms, sautéed quickly with a frothed cream and poured over wild rice. “You can say ragout but don’t say stew,” Jeremiah Tower warns.

“They won’t order it.” While the word “ragout” came from the French, it has been in English use since the seventeenth century when Samuel Butler in Hudibras mocked the new Frenchifications of the English table, “a