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Mushrooms with Tomatoes
Wash, scrub, and peel one half pound of fresh mushrooms. Break in small pieces and sauté in butter. Wash and remove skins from six tomatoes.
Slice tomatoes and arrange in layers with sautéd mushrooms in buttered baking dish or in ramekins. Cover with Tomato Sauce, well seasoned with onion. When dish is filled sprinkle with buttered cracker crumbs and bake until crumbs are brown.
A straightforward gratin of layered tomato and mushroom, written in the shorthand of a period cookbook that assumes you already have a pan of tomato sauce on the stove. Two of its instructions are obsolete, and it gives no temperature or time at all.
- Skip the peelingScrubbing and peeling mushrooms made sense when they came out of a manure bed with grit in the skin. Cultivated mushrooms today need only a wipe or a quick rinse and a trim of the stem end; peeling costs you flavor and needlessly wastes the cap.
- Oven and timeThe recipe names no heat. Bake at 400F for 20 to 25 minutes, until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the crumbs are properly brown. Under a broiler the crumbs will color before the interior has heated through.
- Skinning the tomatoesScore the skins, drop them in boiling water for 15 to 30 seconds, then into cold water; the skins slip off. Out of season, drained canned whole tomatoes are a fair substitute and are already peeled.
- What "Tomato Sauce" means hereIn an American book of 1907 this would most likely be a butter-and-flour sauce thinned with strained stewed tomato rather than an Italian long-simmered sugo; check the book's own sauce chapter. Around a cup, thick enough to coat a spoon, suits the quantities here, and the recipe's instruction to season it well with onion is the dish's main flavoring and should not be treated as optional.
- Keep it from going waterySliced fresh tomatoes shed a great deal of liquid in the oven. Salt the slices and let them drain 15 minutes before layering, and sauté the mushrooms until they have given up their water and begun to brown rather than stopping while they are still pale.
- Buttered cracker crumbsCrush plain unsalted crackers or saltines to coarse crumbs and toss with melted butter, roughly 1 tablespoon butter to 1/2 cup crumbs. Panko works but browns faster; check at 15 minutes.
- YieldHalf a pound of mushrooms and six tomatoes will roughly fill a baking dish of 1 1/2 to 2 quarts, or several small ramekins; expect it to serve about four to six as a light course, more as a side.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and it surrounds its promotional chocolate chapters with a full general cookbook so the volume would earn a place on the kitchen shelf. A dish like this one belongs to the period's large category of meatless entrées: not vegetarian on principle, but the course served between fish and roast, and useful on Fridays and in Lent. Its appearance also reflects a real change in supply. Commercial mushroom growing in cellars and purpose-built houses expanded sharply in the United States around the turn of the century, so a cook in 1907 could buy half a pound of fresh mushrooms. The insistence on scrubbing and peeling them is a holdover from that earlier, dirtier trade.