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Chafing-dish Dainties (Let enne and half a pint)
Let enne and half a pint of rich, sweet cream. boil up once and put out the flame; add a teaspoonful of lemon juice and half a teaspoonful of the grated rind of a lemon (or omit the grated rind); stir well and serve at once.
Puff-balls Sautéd.
Heat three tablespoonfuls of butter or oil in the blazer. Cut the puff-balls in slices half an inch in thickness, season with salt and pepper, dip in egg and bread crumbs, and sauté in the blazer to a golden brown.
The page carries two items, and the first has been badly mangled in transcription — it opens mid-sentence and its title is lost. The second, sautéd puff-balls, is complete and workable as written, provided you are certain of your mushrooms.
- The blazerIn chafing-dish books the blazer is the upper pan that sits directly over the flame; the lower pan is the hot-water bath. Any heavy skillet stands in for it, and the recipe works better over a full stove burner than over an alcohol lamp.
- Identify the puff-balls before anything elseEdible puffballs must be pure, uniform white all the way through when halved top to bottom — no yellow or olive tint, no gills, and no faint outline of a stem and cap. That outline means an immature gilled mushroom, which may be a deadly Amanita: reject it. Any discoloured or greenish interior means the spores have begun to form and the mushroom is past eating.
- Half-inch slices are rightOnly a large puffball — a giant puffball may run 10 inches or more across — will give you slices. Smaller species are cut in halves or quarters. The flesh is spongy and absorbs fat freely, so keep the slices to the stated thickness rather than thinner.
- Fat temperatureThree tablespoons of butter or oil is barely enough for a single layer. Get the fat hot but not smoking before the mushroom goes in, and expect to add more fat between batches; puffball soaks up whatever is in the pan and will steam rather than brown if the fat runs dry.
- The egg-and-crumb coatingSeason and flour the slices lightly before the egg wash, or the coating slides off the damp flesh. Two to three minutes a side gives the golden brown the recipe asks for.
- The fragmentary cream recipeWhat survives is half a pint of cream (one cup) brought to a boil once, taken off the heat, then finished with a teaspoon of lemon juice and half a teaspoon of grated rind. Lemon juice added to hot cream may curdle it; the richer the cream and the further off the boil it is when the acid goes in, the less likely that is. Serve immediately, as the original insists.
- YieldNeither item is given a yield. Three tablespoons of fat will handle enough puffball for two as a first course; the cream makes about a cup, or two small servings.
Chafing-dish cookery was at its height when this book appeared, in the years around 1900, when a spirit lamp and a nickel-plated pan let hostesses cook at the table for late suppers and after-theatre parties — a fashion generally traced to college rooms and bachelor apartments, where a chafing dish was often the only cooking apparatus available. Puffballs belong to the same moment. The slicing, breading and frying treatment here is exactly what nineteenth-century cooks did with eggplant and with green tomatoes, and it suits a mushroom whose texture is closer to a vegetable than to a cultivated button.