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Scalloped Mushrooms
Wash, scrub, and peel one pound of fresh mushrooms.
Sauté in butter. Arrange in layers with White Sauce in buttered baking dish; when filled cover with cubes of bread which have been dipped in butter. Brown in the oven and serve.
A short recipe that assumes you already know how to make white sauce and how hot to run the oven. Both need filling in.
- Skip the peelingPeeling was standard when mushrooms meant large open field caps with tough, often gritty skins. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need only a wipe or a quick rinse and a trim of the stem end; peeling them loses flavor and bulk.
- Drive off the water firstThe hinge of the dish. Sauté the mushrooms in butter over fairly high heat until they have released their liquid and it has evaporated, then let them take a little color. Mushrooms layered in while still weeping will thin the sauce into soup and the crumbs will not crisp.
- White sauce quantityThe recipe assumes the book's own white sauce, which it does not reproduce here; a medium sauce in the usual period proportions is about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, salt and pepper. Roughly a cup and a half seems right for a pound of mushrooms in a small baking dish -- enough to bind the layers, not to swim them.
- The bread topping"Cubes of bread dipped in butter" means half-inch cubes of day-old white bread tossed in melted butter, roughly 2 cups and 3 tablespoons butter. Coarse fresh crumbs work the same way and brown faster.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual in books of this date. The dish is already cooked and only wants browning, so a hot oven around 400F for 15 to 20 minutes should do it, until the sauce bubbles at the edges and the bread is gold.
- SeasoningA plain white sauce of this kind is mild. Salt the mushrooms as they saute, and consider nutmeg, a spoon of sherry, or lemon in the sauce -- all used in the period, though none is called for here.
- YieldServes four as an entrée in the old sense of a small course between the fish and the roast, or two or three as a lunch dish. It can be assembled ahead and browned when wanted; add ten minutes if it goes into the oven cold.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the era it surrounded its confectionery chapters with conventional American home cooking. "Scalloped" here carries its nineteenth-century American meaning: anything layered with sauce or milk in a dish and baked under crumbs, a usage that had drifted away from the scallop shells the word originally described. Cultivated mushrooms were still something of a luxury in 1907 -- commercial growing in the United States expanded in this period, much of it in Pennsylvania -- so a pound of them, buttered and sauced, made a dish worth naming.