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Mushrooms Au Gratin (1 lb mushrooms heaping)
1 lb. mushrooms 3 heaping tablespoonfuls (3 1 teaspoonful chopped parsley ozs.) butter 1 tablespoonful chopped 1 tablespoonful grated cooked meat cheese Stock to moisten 2 tablespoonfuls bread crumbs Salt, pepper, and grated nutmeg to taste Select six large fresh mushrooms from the pound of mushrooms and mince the remainder with the stems.
Sauté the latter in the butter for two minutes.
Mix the bread crumbs, cheese, parsley, seasonings, sautéd mushrooms, and stock to moisten. Fill into the large mushroom caps, sprinkle a few bread crumbs over the top, place in a fireproof dish, and bake for a quarter of an hour.
A straightforward stuffed-mushroom recipe whose ingredient list has been jumbled in the original printing; the method paragraph is the reliable guide. Read quantities against the instructions rather than the column.
- What the amounts appear to beOne pound of mushrooms, three heaping tablespoonfuls of butter (given as 3 oz., so about 6 tablespoons), one teaspoonful chopped parsley, one tablespoonful chopped cooked meat, one tablespoonful grated cheese, two tablespoonfuls bread crumbs, and stock to moisten. Salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was normal before thermostats. Bake at 400F; a quarter of an hour at that heat browns the crumb topping and cooks the caps through without letting them collapse into liquid.
- "Fireproof dish"An ovenproof earthenware or glass baking dish, not the lidded stew pot the word casserole suggests today. A shallow gratin dish suits, with the caps in a single layer.
- Stock, sparingly"To moisten" means a tablespoon or two at most. Mushrooms release a good deal of water in the oven, and a wet stuffing will slump out of the caps and boil rather than gratinate.
- The two-minute sautéThe minced stems and trimmings go into the butter only briefly, to drive off raw flavour. They will finish in the oven, so do not brown them hard or the filling turns bitter.
- The chopped cooked meatA tablespoon of leftover roast, ham or tongue, finely minced. It is a seasoning here rather than a substance, and the dish works without it if you increase the cheese slightly.
- Choosing the capsSix large mushrooms taken from a pound will be caps of roughly 2 to 3 inches, though the recipe gives no size. Remove the stems by twisting rather than cutting, so the cavity stays deep enough to hold the filling.
- YieldSix stuffed caps: a side dish or first course for three, or a light supper for two with bread.
Mushrooms au gratin belongs to the late-Victorian and Edwardian vogue for small, savoury dishes served from the dish they were cooked in, which is the whole premise of this book. Au gratin in period English cookery meant simply a browned crust of crumbs and cheese under a brisk heat, not the cream-heavy preparation the phrase now implies, and the tablespoon each of cheese and cooked meat here is typical of the frugal, flavouring-not-filling approach of household cookery of the time. Cultivated mushrooms were becoming reliably available in Britain and the United States in this period, having previously been a gentleman-gardener's crop grown in beds of stable manure, which may be one reason cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s offer whole clusters of mushroom recipes where earlier ones treated them as an occasional luxury. The pinch of grated nutmeg is often said to be a survival of a much older English habit of seasoning savoury forcemeats with sweet spice.