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Mushrooms, Au Gratin
Large mushrooms must be used for this purpose. Cut the stalks, trim the edges and remove the skin, filling each mushroom with the following preparation: Chop up four shalots, two ounces of fat bacon, a little lean ham grated, or chopped very fine; put these into a stewpan, season with , season with salt and pepper, also a little chopped thyme. Fry over the fire about five minutes; then mix in the yolks of four eggs, fill the mushrooms with this preparation, shake some raspings of bread over them, place in a pan thickly spread with butter; then put into the oven for about one-quarter of an hour and then dish them up in a pyramidal form; pour some brown sauce round them and serve.
A stuffed-mushroom recipe from the era when "au gratin" meant a browned breadcrumb top rather than a cheese sauce. The text has some typesetting stutters ("a little lean, a little lean ham"; "season with, season with") that should simply be read once.
- The mushroomsLarge caps are essential, as the recipe says; portobellos, 3-4 inches across, are the closest modern equivalent. The skinning step the recipe calls for is generally thought unnecessary now; wipe the caps and scrape out the gills if you want a deeper cavity for the filling.
- ShalotsShallots, four of them. Two medium shallots, finely chopped, is about right for four to six large caps.
- RaspingsDried breadcrumbs, traditionally made by grating the hard outer crust of a stale loaf. Panko or any dry fine crumb works; fresh soft crumbs will steam rather than brown.
- Take the pan off the heat before the yolksThis is the hinge. The fried shallot-bacon-ham mixture must cool for a minute or two before the four yolks go in, or they set into scrambled egg and the filling will not hold together in the cap.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A quarter of an hour implies a fairly brisk oven: 400F gets the crumbs coloured and the yolk-bound stuffing set in roughly that time. Check that the mushrooms have softened rather than relying on the clock alone, since caps vary in thickness.
- Brown sauceA period cook meant espagnole or a demi-glace made from the stockpot. A good reduced beef or veal stock, lightly thickened, gives the same effect; a jarred demi-glace concentrate is the practical shortcut.
- The pyramidDishing food up in a pyramid or cone was a common Victorian way of dressing a dish, with the sauce poured round the base rather than over the crumbed tops. Serving them flat on a warmed dish loses nothing but the theatre.
- YieldThe filling as written is generous, probably enough for four to six large caps as a first course or savoury course, fewer as a light main with bread.
"Au gratin" in nineteenth-century English cookery meant the browned surface itself, generally traced to the French gratter, to scrape; the cheese-and-cream dish the phrase now suggests came later. The filling here, with its shallots, bacon, ham, thyme and egg yolk binding, is a plain forcemeat, and the direction to pour brown sauce around rather than over the dish points to French practice. That such a compendium places mushrooms among the vegetables at all is worth noting: cultivated mushroom growing expanded considerably in Britain and the United States through the late 1800s, and by the turn of the century large flat caps were a market item rather than a forager's windfall.