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Mushrooms a la Spinette
Make some puff pastry cases, wash and chop the mushrooms and toss them in butter to which you have added a slice of lemon. Make a bechamel sauce with cream, or, failing that, with thick tinned cream, and mix with the mushrooms. Heat the cases for a few minutes in the oven and fill them with the hot mixture.
A vol-au-vent filling with no quantities given, in the shorthand style of wartime Belgian refugee cookery. The proportions are yours to set; the technique is the point.
- Working quantitiesFor six small puff pastry cases, allow about 12 oz (350 g) mushrooms and roughly a cup of béchamel. The mixture should coat the mushrooms, not drown them, or the pastry collapses.
- Pastry casesBought all-butter puff, cut in rounds with a smaller round scored on top, bakes into a serviceable case at 425F. Frozen vol-au-vent shells work equally well. Warm them through at 350F for five minutes just before filling.
- Wash and chopModern practice is to wipe rather than wash cultivated mushrooms, since waterlogged caps steam instead of browning. If you do rinse them, dry them thoroughly before they meet the butter.
- The slice of lemonIt goes into the pan to keep the mushrooms pale, a habit from an era that prized whiteness in a cream dish. Fish it out before saucing. Leaving the lemon out and letting the mushrooms colour gives a better flavour, if a browner one.
- Toss them in butterCook over decent heat until the liquid the mushrooms give up has boiled away. Adding wet mushrooms to the béchamel thins it and turns the filling grey.
- Thick tinned creamThe wartime fallback, and named as such in the recipe. Evaporated milk or a small tin of thick cream will stand in; if you use either, check the sauce for the faint cooked-milk sweetness it brings.
- Béchamel with creamA roux of 1 oz butter and 1 oz flour with a scant cup of cream or half cream, half milk gives the right thickness. Simmer it a few minutes so the flour loses its rawness before the mushrooms go in.
- Assemble at the last minuteFilled cases soften within ten minutes. Hold the filling hot and the cases warm, and fill only as they go to table.
The Belgian Cook Book was assembled in Britain in 1915 from recipes collected among Belgian refugees after the German invasion, and is generally said to have been sold in aid of relief funds; entries like this one are terse and give no quantities. Mushroom vol-au-vents in cream sauce were standard bourgeois entr e fare across Belgium and northern France, where puff pastry cases filled with a white rago t \em>vol-au-vent of chicken and meatballs still eaten today ound round round round round round round round round round round round.