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Mushrooms au Gratin
4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 14 large mushrooms 1 egg Salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 2 tablespoonfuls chopped cooked meat 2 tablespoonfuls breadcrumbs 1/2 cupful stock 1 tablespoonful chopped suet Beat up egg, add suet, breadcrumbs, meat, parsley, and seasonings. Wash and remove centers from mushrooms, season with salt, pepper, and red pepper, also place tiny piece of Crisco in each. Then put heaping teaspoonful of forcemeat in each one, and cover with crumbs. Lay on Criscoed tin, add stock, and bake fifteen minutes. Serve on hot dish with gravy poured round. Sufficient for fourteen mushrooms.
A stuffed-mushroom recipe from one of Crisco's promotional cookbooks, written when the shortening was still a novelty worth naming in every ingredient list. The instructions omit an oven temperature and assume a cook who knows what forcemeat should feel like.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified. A moderately hot oven, roughly 375-400F, is a reasonable modern reading: fifteen minutes at that heat is hot enough to set the egg-bound stuffing and brown the crumbs before the caps collapse and flood the tin.
- CriscoStill sold, and still behaves as intended here, though it was reformulated in the mid-2000s to cut trans fats to near zero. Butter or oil substitutes freely; the recipe's insistence on Crisco is advertising, not chemistry.
- Red pepperMeans cayenne, not paprika and not a fresh capsicum. A pinch is enough for fourteen mushrooms; it is there for warmth behind the black pepper.
- Chopped suetRaw beef kidney fat, once sold by every butcher and now usually a special order or a packaged shredded product from British suppliers. It melts into the stuffing and keeps it moist. Finely chopped bacon fat or a further spoonful of shortening does the same work.
- The stuffing binds on the mushrooms, not in the bowlOne egg to two tablespoonfuls each of crumbs and meat gives a very loose mixture. Add crumbs until it just holds a heaped teaspoonful without running, or it will slide off the caps in the oven.
- "Remove centers"Most likely twist out the stems rather than cutting into the cap. The stems can be chopped and added to the forcemeat instead of discarded, though the recipe does not say so.
- Stock in the tinThe half cupful is not a sauce but a shallow bath that stops the caps drying and becomes the gravy. Use a shallow pan barely larger than the mushrooms so the liquid does not spread thin and scorch.
- YieldThe recipe specifies only that the forcemeat suffices for fourteen mushrooms; it gives no servings. As a rough modern estimate, fourteen large caps might serve four as a vegetable course or six or seven as an appetizer. "Chopped cooked meat" is leftovers -- roast beef, ham, chicken all work.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished after 1911, when Procter & Gamble launched Crisco and set about teaching American cooks to use a hydrogenated vegetable shortening where they had always used lard or butter. The books were written by professional cookery authors -- Marion Harris Neil among them -- and read as ordinary household manuals except that Crisco appears in nearly every recipe, often, as here, in places where the fat is barely doing anything a tiny piece under each mushroom cannot. The dish itself is standard turn-of-the-century Anglo-American cookery: a forcemeat of crumbs, suet, egg and minced cooked meat, the same mixture that filled veal birds and stuffed tomatoes, pressed into service for mushrooms. Au gratin here means simply crumbed and browned, without the cheese and cream sauce the phrase came to imply later.