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Bacon and Mushrooms
Wrap eight mushrooms in eight slices of bacon. Cook in chafing dish until mushrooms are tender. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and serve.
A two-line chafing dish savoury that works as written, provided the bacon and the mushrooms are given time to finish together. The whole thing hinges on the bacon being thin enough to render before the mushroom collapses.
- The chafing dishA chafing dish is a shallow pan over a spirit lamp or hot water — gentle, indirect heat, roughly the equivalent of a skillet over medium-low. A heavy frying pan on the stovetop does the same job faster; a 400F oven on a rack over a sheet pan renders the bacon more evenly.
- Bacon thicknessUse thin-cut bacon, not thick-cut. Modern thick bacon needs eight to ten minutes to render, by which point the mushroom has given up its water and gone slack.
- Hold them togetherThe original assumes the bacon will cling. Secure each roll with a toothpick or small skewer, seam-side down to start, and turn once the fat has set the wrap in place.
- MushroomsWhole button or cremini mushrooms of even size, stems trimmed flush, about 1 to 1.5 inches across. Larger caps release too much liquid and steam the bacon rather than crisping it.
- TimingSix to eight minutes total in a pan, turning, is usually enough — the bacon should be browned and the mushroom yielding to a skewer. Pour off rendered fat partway if it begins to pool and fry rather than crisp.
- SaltSeason with pepper freely but taste before salting. Bacon carries plenty of salt of its own, and the instruction to sprinkle salt may need ignoring altogether.
- YieldEight rolls serves two as a savoury course or four as an appetiser. The quantities scale directly.
Chafing dish cookery was a minor craze in American households from the 1890s through the First World War: a spirit lamp, a shallow pan and a small repertoire of quickly assembled dishes meant a hostess could cook at the table without a servant or a hot kitchen. Whole books were devoted to it, and bacon-wrapped oysters, olives, dates and mushrooms belonged squarely to that repertoire, close kin to the devils-on-horseback style of savoury still served at drinks. Lowney's Cook Book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and is a full general cookbook as well as a vehicle for the firm's chocolate recipes.