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Mushrooms
1/2 tablespoon lemon juice. 1/4 teaspoon finely chopped parsley. 1/4 teaspoon salt. 1/4 cup heavy cream. Few grains pepper. Cream the butter, add lemon juice drop by drop, salt, pepper, and parsley. Cut bread in circular piece threeeighths inch thick, then toast. Put one-half of the sauce on the under side of toast; put toast on a small bakingdish, pile mushroom caps cleaned and pealed in conical shape on toast, and pour over cream. Cover with glass and bake about twenty-five minutes, adding more cream if necessary. Just before serving add one teaspoon Sherry wine.
Vegetable Soufflé 1/4 cup butter 1 cup cooked vegetables 1/4 cup flour rubbed through a sieve, - 1/3 cup cream carrots, turnips, or onions 1/3 cup water in which vege- Yolks 3 eggs tables were cooked Whites 3 eggs Salt and pepper Melt butter, add flour, and pour on gradually cream and water; add vegetable, yolks of eggs beaten until thick and lemon colored, and fold in whites of eggs beaten until stiff, then add seasonings. Turn in a buttered baking-dish and bake in a slow oven.
Two dishes run together on this page: baked mushrooms on toast (the ingredient list for which has been lost, only the method survives) and a vegetable soufflé. Both assume conventions that have quietly disappeared.
- The missing ingredientsThe mushroom recipe begins mid-stream: the butter, lemon juice, salt, pepper, parsley and cream are called for in the method but their quantities belong to a list not reproduced here. Any amounts are guesswork; as a starting point, something like 2 tablespoons butter, a teaspoon of lemon juice, a tablespoon of chopped parsley and about 1/2 cup cream over 1/2 lb caps will work.
- "Cover with glass"Not a glass lid in the modern sense but an inverted heatproof glass bowl or bell set over the dish, trapping steam so the caps braise rather than dry out. A tight cover of foil, or a lid, does the same job.
- Peeling mushroomsRecipes of this period commonly direct that cultivated caps be skinned, though the reasoning is rarely given. Modern cultivated mushrooms need only a wipe.
- Twenty-five minutesLong for mushrooms by current standards, but the point here is to draw their liquor into the cream and soak the toast beneath. Check at fifteen minutes and add cream if the dish has gone dry, as the recipe instructs.
- The sherry goes in lastThe recipe adds it just before serving rather than during baking, so it reads as aroma rather than as a cooked-in ingredient.
- Soufflé ovenSouffle oven -- 'Slow oven' is usually taken to mean somewhere around 250-325F, at the low end of what a souffle wants. Modern practice for a vegetable souffle of this size is 325F for 30 to 40 minutes, until set at the edge and barely trembling at the centre.
- The soufflé baseThe butter and flour make a thick roux; the cream and cooking water go in gradually to keep it smooth. Let the base cool slightly before beating in the yolks, or they will scramble in streaks.
- Order of seasoningAs written, salt and pepper go in after the whites are folded, which risks deflating the mixture while you stir. Season the base before the whites go in.
- YieldNeither dish states a yield. On three eggs, the souffle would be expected to serve three to four as a side.
Mushrooms on toast under cream sat at the point where an English savoury met an American vegetable course, and the recipe sits firmly among the vegetables rather than at the end of dinner. The elaborate business of creaming butter with lemon and parsley, spreading it beneath the toast rather than on top, and piling the caps into a cone is the sort of plated formality that marks the more ambitious chafing-dish and luncheon recipes of the period. Cultivated mushrooms were still something of a luxury in the 1890s: commercial growing in caves and cellars was expanding in the United States, while household books of the period devote anxious paragraphs to distinguishing the edible from the poisonous. The vegetable soufflé that follows shows the other face of the school: a single technique — white sauce, yolks, whipped whites — presented as a formula into which carrots, turnips or onions can be dropped interchangeably.