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Eggs and Mushrooms
Cut off the ends and stalks from half a pint of button mushrooms, put them into a basin of water with a little lemon-juice as they are done. Drain and slice them with some large onions, and fry in butter. If preferred, the onions can be omitted, and the mushrooms can be stewed whole. Put the mushrooms when tender on a dish, break some eggs upon them to cover the surface, and in doing this be careful not to break the yolks of the eggs. Season with salt and pepper, sprinkle browned crumbs on the top, and put the dish in a hot oven till the eggs are set. Serve immediately. Time to stew mushrooms, from ten to fifteen minutes. Cost of mushrooms, 8d. to 1s. 6d. per pound, according to season.
A baked egg gratin over stewed mushrooms — quick, but the eggs will punish a heavy hand with the oven. Read the timing note first.
- Half a pint of mushroomsThe recipe measures by volume rather than by weight, as it does elsewhere for small vegetables. Half a pint of trimmed buttons is roughly 4–6 oz (110–175 g), enough for two people.
- "A hot oven" for eggsThe book gives no temperatures, and "hot oven" in Victorian usage is generally read as somewhere around 425–450F, which is too fierce here unless you are watching constantly. Set 400F (200C) and expect set whites in 8–12 minutes; the yolks should still be soft when you pull the dish.
- The hingeTake the dish out while the whites look barely opaque and the yolks still tremble. Carryover heat in a hot gratin dish finishes them, and eggs that look done in the oven are chalky at the table.
- Browned crumbsThis means dry breadcrumbs already toasted golden in butter or in the oven, not fresh crumbs. Untoasted crumbs will not colour in the short baking time and simply go pasty on the egg white.
- Lemon waterThe acidulated water keeps trimmed buttons pale. It is cosmetic; skip it if you are cooking them straight away, and drain them thoroughly either way, since wet mushrooms steam instead of frying.
- Drive off the moistureThe ten to fifteen minutes given is for stewing. If you fry with onions instead, keep the pan hot enough to evaporate the liquor — a wet mushroom bed will thin out under the eggs and leave the dish watery.
- Dish and depthUse a shallow gratin dish or ovenproof skillet so the eggs sit in a single layer. In anything deep, the whites pool and the crumbs are cooked long before the eggs are.
- YieldAs written it serves two as a light supper or breakfast dish, with one or two eggs each depending on the surface area of the dish.
Eggs baked on a bed of vegetables — loosely comparable to oeufs sur le plat in the French kitchen — was a staple of the late-Victorian breakfast and supper table, cheap enough for a modest household and quick enough to be made to order. The price note is the interesting part: eight pence to one and six a pound marks the range a cook might expect to pay for mushrooms, a crop by then grown in England in purpose-built beds of spent manure as well as gathered wild. Cassell's gives seasonal price ranges throughout, which suggests a cook was expected to plan the week's meals around what the market was charging, and a dish like this one — mushrooms stretched with onions, or without them if the budget allowed better mushrooms — was designed to flex either way.