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Mushroom Cromeskies (See cut facing page Peel)
(See cut facing page 198.) Peel the caps of fresh mushrooms; wrap each mushroom in a slice of bacon, pinning the bacon around the mushroom with a wooden toothpick.
Sauté in a hot blazer and serve on toast. These are particularly good, cooked in a hot oven in a double broiler resting over a baking-pan.
A two-ingredient chafing-dish savoury that depends entirely on the bacon crisping before the mushroom collapses. Everything else is detail.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame. Any heavy skillet stands in for it; the point is direct, fairly high heat rather than the gentle hot-water bath used for the lower pan.
- "Double broiler"Not a double boiler. This is a hinged wire broiler — two grids that clamp the food between them — set over a baking pan so the fat drips clear. A wire rack over a rimmed sheet pan does the same job.
- Oven temperatureA hot oven in this period is generally taken as somewhere around 400-450F. At that heat, reckon on roughly 15-20 minutes, turning once, until the bacon is crisp on both sides; the recipe itself gives no time.
- Peeling the capsCultivated mushrooms today have thin, clean skins and need only a wipe. Peeling was standard when field mushrooms arrived gritty and coarse-skinned; skip it unless the caps are genuinely tough.
- BaconUse thin-cut streaky bacon, not thick-cut. Thick rashers will not render through in the time a mushroom takes to cook, and you get flabby fat around a shrunken cap. One slice per mushroom, stretched slightly before wrapping.
- ToothpicksWooden picks scorch in a hot oven and can snap when the bacon shrinks and tightens. Soak them first, or use short metal skewers, and count them off the pan before serving.
- Size and timingChoose mushrooms of roughly equal size — around 1.5 inches across — so they finish together. Larger caps release a great deal of liquid and will steam the bacon rather than let it crisp.
- Yield and servingFigure two to three per person as a savoury or first course, one per person on a canapé of toast. Cut the toast to the size of the mushroom so it stays a mouthful, and serve at once; they go limp as they cool.
Cromeski (also kromeski or kromesky) entered English kitchens by way of French professional cookery, its name often traced — though uncertainly — to the Polish kromka, and in its strict sense means a croquette mixture wrapped in a thin sheet of bacon or calf's udder, then battered and deep-fried. By the turn of the twentieth century the name had loosened to cover almost anything bacon-wrapped and fried, which is what Janet McKenzie Hill offers here. Its place in a chafing-dish book is telling: the chafing dish was the fashionable apparatus of the 1890s and 1900s for late suppers, bachelor entertaining and after-theatre parties, cooking at the table in rooms where a servant might not be summoned. Bacon-wrapped mushrooms suited that setting exactly — no sauce to break, no batter to manage, and a savoury course produced in front of guests from two ingredients a household could keep on hand.