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Pepper and Salt (Little Brown Sauce)
A little Brown Sauce.
Take some mushrooms, not too large and as much of a size as possible, peel and trim them, chop up the trimmings with the shalot and parsley, sauté them in the butter, add a little brown sauce, the bread-crumbs, pepper and salt.
Stuff the mushrooms with this mixture, put them in the oven for about ten minutes. Place each mushroom on a croûte of bread its own size, and serve very hot.
Œufs à l'Aurore.
Ingredients.
Five Eggs, hard-boiled.
Mix half a pint of good White Sauce and Tomato Sauce. Yolk of one Egg, raw.
One tablespoonful of Tarragon Vinegar.
Two entries have run together here: a stuffed-mushroom savoury with its ingredients scrambled into the title, and the opening ingredient list of a separate dish, Œufs à l'Aurore. Only the first is a complete set of instructions.
- The title is a printing accident"Pepper and Salt" and "A little Brown Sauce" are the tail end of an ingredient column that belongs beside the method: mushrooms, shallot, parsley, butter, brown sauce, breadcrumbs, pepper and salt. No quantities survive anywhere in the entry.
- Working proportionsFor twelve mushrooms of about two inches across, the trimmings plus one shallot and a tablespoon of parsley, sautéed in an ounce of butter with two tablespoons of brown sauce and two of dry breadcrumbs, will fill them. Judge by eye — the mixture should mound without slumping.
- Brown sauceIn a kitchen of this period this means espagnole or a reduced demi-glace kept on the stove as a matter of course. A few spoonfuls of any well-reduced brown stock sauce does the same job; the point is concentrated savour and enough body to bind the crumbs.
- Cook the filling dryThis is the hinge. Mushroom trimmings release a great deal of water, and ten minutes in the oven will not drive it off. Sauté the chopped trimmings and shallot until the pan is dry and the mixture darkens before adding sauce and crumbs, or the stuffing will slide out in a puddle.
- Oven heatUnspecified; the recipe says only "in the oven." Around 400F for the stated ten minutes suits mushrooms of this size — long enough to soften the caps, short enough that they do not collapse.
- CroûtesRounds of bread cut to match each mushroom. A croûte in this repertoire is normally fried in butter or clarified butter until crisp rather than toasted, though the recipe says only "a croûte of bread its own size." Cut them before the mushrooms shrink, allowing for that by cutting slightly small.
- Yield and serviceTwo mushrooms per person as a savoury at the close of dinner, or four as a first course. They must go to table straight from the oven; a cooled croûte turns leathery and the caps weep.
- The Œufs à l'Aurore fragmentFive hard-boiled eggs, half a pint of white sauce mixed with tomato sauce, a raw yolk and a tablespoon of tarragon vinegar are the ingredients for a different dish entirely. Dishes under this name are usually built from halved eggs with the yolks worked into the tomato-tinted sauce, then masked and browned, but the method is not on this page and cannot be recovered from the list alone.
Stuffed mushrooms on a fried croûte belong to the English savoury course, that peculiarly Victorian and Edwardian institution of a small, hot, strongly seasoned dish served after the sweet and before dessert, meant to settle the palate for the port. Books of "high class cookery" — the trade term for the French-derived repertoire taught to cooks in large private households — carry dozens of them: anchovy toasts, devilled bones, cheese ramekins, mushrooms in every arrangement. The filling here is essentially a duxelles, the finely chopped mushroom-and-shallot preparation generally credited to the seventeenth-century French kitchen and named for the Marquis d'Uxelles, and its presence in a savoury shows how thoroughly professional English cooking of the period had absorbed French method along with its vocabulary. The insistence on mushrooms "as much of a size as possible" is a mark of the same tradition: uniformity was itself a display of the kitchen's resources.</p>