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Eggs and Mushrooms
Pick over half a pound of mushrooms, cut them in small pieces like dice, and put them to stew in the oven with plenty of butter, pepper, and salt. Make a thick white sauce, and you may add to it the juice from the mushrooms when they are cooked; then stir in the mushrooms. Take three hard-boiled eggs, and separate yolks from whites. Put into a shallow vegetable-dish the whites cut up in small pieces, pour over them the bechamel with the mushrooms, and finish up by sprinkling over the top the hard-boiled yolks, which you have crumbled up with a fork.
A simple gratin-less assembly: creamed mushrooms over chopped hard-boiled egg whites, finished with sieved yolks. The recipe assumes you already know how to make a béchamel, so the quantities below fill the gaps.
- Scale and yieldHalf a pound of mushrooms and three eggs serves two as a light supper dish, or four as a first course. Doubling works without adjustment.
- Stewing the mushrooms"In the oven with plenty of butter" means a covered dish in a moderate oven, or simply a covered pan on low heat; the recipe gives neither temperature nor time, so judge by the mushrooms. The point is to draw out the liquid without browning, since that liquid goes into the sauce.
- The thick white sauceRoughly 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk. Make it deliberately stiff, because the mushroom juices will thin it; a loose sauce will run off the egg whites and pool in the dish.
- Béchamel versus white sauceThe recipe uses both terms for the same thing. In Belgian and French usage of the period a béchamel is simply a milk-based white sauce, sometimes infused with onion, bay and clove -- worth doing here, as the dish has little other seasoning.
- Hard-boiled eggsTen minutes from a boil, then straight into cold water, gives firm yolks that crumble cleanly. Overcooked yolks turn grey-green and chalky, which shows badly as a topping.
- MushroomsOrdinary cultivated white or cremini mushrooms are what this wants. Wipe rather than soak them; the recipe depends on their own juices concentrating, not on added water.
- ServingNothing is baked, so everything must be hot when it meets: warm the dish, have the sauce at a simmer and the egg whites freshly peeled. It cools quickly in a shallow vegetable dish.
- SeasoningButter, pepper and salt are the whole seasoning list. A grating of nutmeg in the béchamel and a little lemon juice at the end are period-appropriate and keep it from tasting flat.
The Belgian Cook-Book was assembled in 1915 by Mrs. Brian Luck from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled to England after the German invasion, and it was sold in aid of relief funds. That context explains a good deal about dishes like this one: three eggs and half a pound of mushrooms make a substantial dish with no meat in it at all, and the whole thing is built from the sort of larder a displaced household could actually assemble. The technique -- hard-boiled eggs masked with béchamel -- belongs to the broad family of oeufs à la tripe and its relatives, a staple of French and Belgian home cooking in which a cheap protein is dignified by a good sauce. The separation of whites from yolks, with the yolks crumbled over the top, is a small piece of presentation logic that survives in modern egg salads and garnishes, and the sieved-yolk effect is sometimes called mimosa in French culinary shorthand for the yellow speckling it produces, though the term is not used in this book.