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Deviled Mushrooms
Mix one teaspoon mustard, few grains cayenne, one teaspoon Worcestershire Sauce, and half teaspoon paprika. Cover Broiled Mushrooms with this mixture and serve on slices of toast.
A finishing sauce rather than a dish in itself: it assumes you have already broiled the mushrooms by the book's earlier direction. The quantities given make barely a tablespoon of paste, so scale it to what you are actually cooking.
- Mustard means dry mustardMustard here is most likely dry mustard -- in a cook book of this date an unqualified "mustard" usually means the powder rather than the prepared jar. A teaspoon of the powder is assertive; a teaspoon of prepared mustard would be milder and wetter, which changes the consistency of the paste.
- It needs fat to spreadAs written the mixture is a stiff dry paste that will sit in clumps. Many deviling mixtures of the period were worked into softened butter, and a tablespoon or two of butter carries the spices over the mushroom caps evenly.
- Scale to the mushroomsThe recipe names no quantity of mushrooms at all. As a rough guide the amounts given will season something like half a pound of large caps; increase in proportion for more.
- Broiling the mushroomsStem large caps, brush with butter, and broil gill side up close to the element for three to five minutes until the juices pool in the cup. Mushrooms are largely water; they want fast, high heat, not the long slow broiling some older books allow.
- Paprika then and nowPaprika in an American book of this date would have been a mild, sweet type, commonly imported from Hungary, used as much for colour as for heat. Smoked or hot paprika will dominate the Worcestershire and the mustard.
- Assemble at the last momentThe mushroom liquor and the sauce will soak a slice of toast within a minute or two. Toast while the mushrooms are under the broiler and plate immediately.
"Deviled" in Anglo-American cookery simply means seasoned hot -- mustard, cayenne, pepper, and from the mid-nineteenth century very often Worcestershire -- and the term was in use in England by the early nineteenth century for grilled kidneys, bones and poultry legs served at breakfast or supper. By the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared, the technique had been transferred to almost anything that would take a hot paste, mushrooms included. Cultivated mushrooms were still relatively costly in American markets in the first decade of the twentieth century, much of the crop grown in cellars and caves near the large cities. The book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cook books of the era it surrounds its promotional chocolate recipes with a full general repertoire.