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Scalloped Mushrooms
Skin one pound of mushrooms, cut them up and sprinkle with paprika and salt. Cook in butter for fifteen minutes, add one tablespoon of flour and mix well. Add one gill of milk and cook for five minutes. Then add one teaspoon of chopped parsley. Line a shallow baking dish with mashed potato, pour the mushrooms into it and make a border around the edge with mashed potato pressed through a forcing bag with a roseforcer at the end. Put in the oven for ten minutes. Serve in the same dish.
A simple creamed-mushroom gratin under a piped potato border. The original assumes you know what a gill is, what a roseforcer does, and how hot to set the oven — none of which it says.
- A gill of milkAbout half a cup (4 fl oz) in American measure; British gills run to 5 fl oz, so anywhere in that range will do. A tablespoon of flour to that much milk gives a thick binding sauce, loosened by the liquid the mushrooms give up, which suits a dish the potato border will absorb from.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Ten minutes is only long enough to heat through and colour the potato, so use a hot oven, around 425F, or finish it under the broiler for a minute.
- Skinning mushroomsPeeling the caps was routine in period recipes. Cultivated button or cremini mushrooms need only a wipe; peeling throws away flavour and colour.
- Fifteen minutes in butterLonger than modern practice for sliced mushrooms, but not wrong here. They will release their liquid, reabsorb it and brown, which is where the dish gets its depth. Keep the heat moderate so the butter does not burn before the water cooks off.
- RoseforcerA star tip in a piping bag. Any large open or closed star tip gives the same fluted border. Stiff, well-dried mashed potato pipes cleanly; wet potato slumps.
- The unstated potatoNo quantity is given. About 2 lb of potatoes, mashed with butter and a little milk and seasoned firmly, will line a shallow 8- or 9-inch dish and leave enough for the border.
- SeasoningPaprika and salt go on the raw mushrooms, so the paprika cooks in the butter from the start. Use a plain sweet paprika; smoked paprika will take the dish somewhere else entirely.
- YieldOne pound of mushrooms and a shallow dish serves two as a main course or four as a side.
Books of meatless cookery multiplied in the English-speaking world in the early twentieth century, driven by three different currents at once: Lenten and Friday abstinence in Catholic households, the vegetarian and food-reform movements, and wartime campaigns urging families to spare meat for the troops. Their central problem was structural rather than culinary — a meal was expected to have a substantial centre, and so such books were filled with dishes engineered to occupy that place on the plate. Mushrooms did the work well: savoury, browned in fat, with the meaty depth that later cooks would learn to call umami. The piped potato border is pure period restaurant manner, the same treatment given to fish and hashes in hotel cookery of the day, and it is doing a job here — it makes a dish of mushrooms and white sauce look like something a family would recognise as dinner.