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MUSHROOMS (au Gratin)
Skin, wash, drain, and wipe dry some freshly-gathered flap mushrooms. Cut the stems to within a quarter of an inch, and fill the cup with the following seasoning. Grated ham or bacon (rather fat), two ounces, shredded shallot, half an ounce, a small bunch of chopped parsley, some thyme, a little powdered mace, and pepper and salt. Simmer the seasoning for five minutes in a little butter, and add the yolks of two eggs. Stand the mushrooms, well dredged with browned crumbs (raspings), in a flat baking-dish, which should be well smeared with butter, and bake in a moderate oven. When done, serve piled on a hot dish, with some brown sauce around the mushrooms. Time, about fifteen minutes to bake. Probable cost, according to season.
A straightforward stuffed-mushroom dish whose only real obstacles are two vanished words: flap mushrooms and raspings. Once those are decoded it is a 30-minute recipe.
- Flap mushroomsVictorian shorthand for the mature, fully opened field mushroom (Agaricus campestris), gills exposed and cap flat or dished. Large portobellos are the direct commercial equivalent; four to six of them make a dish. If you are gathering wild ones, identify them with certainty — several dangerous Amanita species pass for a field mushroom at a glance.
- SkinningPeeling the cap was routine when mushrooms came in from a field with grit and dew on them. With cultivated caps it is unnecessary and costs you flavour; wipe them, scrape out the gills if you want a cleaner-looking cup, and trim the stem to the quarter-inch the recipe specifies.
- RaspingsDried crusts of bread grated to crumbs and toasted brown — the standard nineteenth-century coating crumb. Panko or dry breadcrumbs toasted in a dry pan until nut-coloured give the same effect. Fresh soft crumbs will steam rather than crisp.
- Moderate oven350F / 175C. Fifteen minutes suits small caps; large portobellos want 20 to 25, until the flesh gives easily to a knife and liquid has stopped pooling in the dish.
- The egg yolksTake the seasoning off the heat before the yolks go in, and let it cool a minute. Added to a simmering pan they scramble and the stuffing turns granular instead of binding into a paste that will hold in the cup.
- Grated ham or bacon"Rather fat" is the operative instruction — the fat renders into the shallot and herbs and carries the seasoning. Finely chopped streaky bacon or a fatty cooked ham works; lean deli ham gives a dry, stringy filling. Two ounces is about 55 g.
- Shallot and maceHalf an ounce of shallot is one small one, finely shredded. Powdered mace is the outer covering of nutmeg — warmer and less sharp; a pinch is enough, and grated nutmeg is a tolerable stand-in.
- Brown sauceThe recipe says only "some brown sauce": an espagnole-style sauce or a well-reduced meat gravy would both answer, poured around rather than over so the crumbed tops stay crisp. A reduction of good beef stock finished with butter serves the same purpose.
- YieldNo quantity of mushrooms is given. The stuffing as written fills roughly six large caps, enough for four as a savoury course or two as a light supper dish.
Au gratin in a book of this vintage means what it still means in French — finished with a crust, here of browned raspings rather than cheese. The recipe belongs to the long British habit of treating the open field mushroom as a small vessel: the cup left by the trimmed stem catches butter and juices, and stuffing it with forcemeat, ham and shallot turns a cheap gathered find into a savoury course fit for the end of a dinner. Cassell's dates from a period when much of the mushroom supply was still gathered rather than grown, commercial cultivation being comparatively limited. The insistence on freshly-gathered is practical as much as culinary — an open-gilled mushroom deteriorates quickly, and domestic refrigeration was not available.