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Mushroom Mixture
Melt two tablespoons butter, add two tablespoons flour, one tablespoon finely chopped onion, one half cup chopped mushrooms, one teaspoon salt, and cream to make of consistency to shape. This is sufficient to stuff eight chops.
A thick panada-style stuffing for pork or lamb chops, written in the telegraphic style of its period: the book assumes you know that a butter-and-flour mixture must be cooked before and after the liquid goes in.
- Cook it, then cool itThe instruction that matters most is missing from the text. Melt the butter, soften the onion and mushrooms in it, stir in the flour and cook it a minute or two, then add the cream and cook until the mass pulls cleanly away from the side of the pan. Spread it on a plate and chill; it only becomes stiff enough to shape when cold.
- "Cream to make of consistency to shape"Genuinely open-ended, and mushrooms vary in moisture, so no fixed amount would serve. Expect roughly a third of a cup for two tablespoons of flour. Add it in stages and stop while the mixture is still stiff enough to hold a thumbprint.
- SaltA teaspoon for what amounts to about a cup of stuffing is heavy by current taste, particularly with brined or enhanced supermarket pork. Half a teaspoon, adjusted at the end, is closer to the mark.
- The mushroomsIn 1907 this would have meant cultivated Agaricus, then cream or brownish rather than the modern white button, or possibly canned mushrooms; ordinary cultivated mushrooms remain the closest match. Chop them fine and let them give up their water in the butter before the flour goes in, or the stuffing will loosen as the chops cook.
- Stuffing eight chopsThe text says only 'chops', but a filling of this kind needs a pocket cut in from the bone side. Thin modern chops will not take one; ask for chops at least an inch and a quarter thick, and allow about two tablespoons of the mixture each.
- Finishing the chopsThe book gives no method here. Brown the stuffed chops and finish them in a moderate oven, around 350F. Pork should reach 145F internal at the meat, not the stuffing, with a three-minute rest; the filling is already cooked and needs only to heat through.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounds its promotional confectionery chapters with a full general household manual. This entry belongs to a family of thick white-sauce fillings that American kitchens borrowed from French practice, where a stiff flour-and-cream paste of this kind is the base for croquettes and forcemeats. Chopped mushrooms bound in such a paste appear as a stuffing in turn-of-the-century American cooking, carrying a whiff of the restaurant kitchen. The brevity of the instructions is typical: the book was written for cooks who already understood that a roux is cooked, and needed only the proportions.