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Grilled Mushrooms
1 cup mushrooms, pepper and salt to taste, Crisco, and lemon juice. Carefully peel the mushrooms, cut off a portion of stalk, and season with salt. Broil them over a clear fire, turning them once, and arrange them on a very hot dish. Put a small piece of Crisco on each mushroom, season with pepper and salt to taste, and squeeze over them a few drops of lemon juice.
A three-ingredient dish that lives or dies on heat: the mushrooms must cook fast enough to brown before they collapse into their own liquid. Everything else is seasoning.
- "A clear fire"This means coals burned down past the smoke and flame, radiating steady heat with nothing to flavour the food. An overhead broiler set to high, with the rack 3-4 inches from the element, is the closest indoor equivalent; a hot grill also works. Figure 3-4 minutes a side for large caps.
- Skip the peelingPeriod cookery books routinely called for peeling mushroom caps, as this one does. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms sold today need only a wipe with a damp cloth, and peeling them throws away flavour and colour.
- CriscoThe recipe comes from a book written to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated vegetable shortening. A small knob of butter in each cap does the same job and tastes considerably better; the shortening was there because the publisher was selling it.
- Salt twice, deliberatelySalt twice -- the recipe seasons before broiling and again after. Salt draws moisture to the surface, so if you want browning rather than stewing, salt lightly at the start and finish the seasoning at the table.
- Gills upNot stated in the original but worth doing: broil stem-side up after the first turn so the cup holds the juices and the melting fat instead of dripping them into the fire.
- "A very hot dish"Not decorative advice. Mushrooms shed heat fast and go tepid and slack on a cold plate. Warm the serving dish in a 200F oven while they cook.
- Quantity and yieldA cup of whole mushrooms is roughly 3 oz, which serves one as a savoury or a breakfast side. Scale up freely; the method does not change.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which the company introduced in 1911 as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. That explains the otherwise puzzling instruction to finish grilled mushrooms with a lump of shortening rather than butter, and why Crisco appears in nearly every recipe in the book, appropriate or not. Grilled or broiled mushrooms themselves are far older than the cookbook and require no such justification: they belong to the English breakfast and savoury tradition, where field mushrooms gathered in late summer were cooked over coals and dressed with butter, pepper and a squeeze of lemon. The peeling step, standard in period cookery books, reflects mushrooms bought loose and dusty from a market rather than the clean, uniformly cultivated caps now sold in punnets.