Greek-style mushrooms, a French café standard

I feel like I've posted recipes and photos of the dish called Champignons à la grecque — "Greeked" mushrooms — many times. In fact, I just ran a search of my whole blog and I found only three posts with the word grecque in them. The oldest was posted in 2007, and the "newest" in 2010!

Almost a week ago, I bought a pound of mushrooms — champignons de Paris, "button mushrooms" — and then the weather turned just too hot for me to want to cook them on the stove. Yesterday, with our high temperature of 76ºF, the time had come. Since there were so many of them, I prepared them Greek-style, with onion, herbs, spices, white wine, lemon juice, and olive oil. Here's a recipe I copied out of the PDF version of the Larousse Gastronomique food and cooking encyclopedia.

Champignons à la grecque

PRÉPARATION : 30 minutes - CUISSON : 12 minutes

Nettoyer 600 g de petits champignons de Paris (calibre boutons). Éplucher, laver 120 g de petits oignons nouveaux (12 pièces). Presser le jus de 1 citron. Confectionner 1 bouquet garni. Éplucher et dégermer 1 gousse d'ail. Envelopper et ficeler dans une mousseline ou une gaze hydrophile 15 graines de coriandre, 20 grains de poivre et la gousse d'ail. Mettre à chauffer 5 cl d'huile d'olive dans un sautoir, y faire suer les petits oignons sans coloration pendant 5 minutes. Ajouter les champignons boutons entiers (ou escalopés si vous avez des champignons plus gros), puis le jus de citron, 10 cl de vin blanc sec, le bouquet garni, du sel et la mousseline d'aromates. Porter rapidement à ébullition, couvrir et laisser cuire 5 ou 6 minutes. Retirer le couvercle et, au besoin, réduire vivement la cuisson car elle doit être courte, sirupeuse et enrobant parfaitement les champignons. Éliminer le bouquet garni et la mousseline d'aromates. Vérifier l'assaisonnement. Dresser dans un ravier et laisser refroidir. Ce hors-d'œuvre est consommé froid.

I've posted a different but pretty similar recipe before, and translated it into English. I did a couple of things differently this time. First of all, I used yellow tomato paste instead of red tomato paste, because we had some jars of yellow paste that we made and put up last summer. So these don't look like they've been cooked with tomato, even though they taste like tomato.

Also, after the mushrooms were cooked, I used a pair of tongs to take them out of the sauce one by one, leaving the coriander seeds, peppercorns, diced onion, etc. behind. Then I strained the sauce, reduced it to a syrupy consistency by boiling it down, and poured it back over the mushrooms. Champignons à la grecque are usually eaten chilled, so put them in the refrigerator overnight before serving them as a first course or hors-d'œuvre.