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Stuffed Mushrooms
Brush twelve large mushrooms. Remove stems, chop finely, and peel caps. Melt three tablespoons butter, add one-half tablespoon finely chopped shallot and chopped stems, then cook ten minutes. Add one and one-half tablespoons flour, chicken stock to moisten, a slight grating of nutmeg, one-half teaspoon finely chopped parsley, and salt and pepper to taste. Cool mixture and fill caps, well rounding over top. Cover with buttered cracker crumbs, and bake fifteen minutes in a hot oven.
Mushrooms under Glass I Cover the bottom of an individual baking-dish with circular pieces of toasted bread. Arrange mushroom caps on toast, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dot over with butter, and pour over a small quantity of hot cream. Cover, and bake twenty minutes.
Individual dishes with bell-shaped glass covers may be bought at first-class kitchen furnishers. These dishes are sent to table with covers left on, that the fine flavor of the prepared viand may all be retained.
Mushrooms under Glass II 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice Bread ¼ teaspoon salt Few grains pepper ¼ teaspoon finely chopped parsley 1/4 cup heavy cream Sherry wine
A straightforward duxelles-style filling, plus two variants on the Edwardian trick of serving mushrooms under a glass bell. The page as printed runs three recipes together, and the last one is only an ingredient list.
- The hinge: cook the stems dryTen minutes over gentle heat is meant to drive the water out of the chopped stems before the flour goes in. Rush it and the filling stays loose and will slump out of the caps in the oven.
- Chicken stock "to moisten"Deliberately vague, and it has to be. Add a tablespoon at a time until the mixture is a thick, mounding paste roughly the texture of stiff mashed potato; it will take only a few tablespoons for this quantity.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 400-450F. Fifteen minutes at that heat browns the crumbs and cooks the caps through; the filling is already cooked, so you are only setting and browning.
- Skip the peelingPeeling caps was standard when mushrooms came in field-gathered with tough, discoloured skins. Cultivated white or cremini mushrooms need a wipe with a damp cloth and nothing more. "Brush" means brush off the dirt, not brush with butter.
- Cracker crumbsNineteenth-century cracker crumbs came from plain soda or water crackers, closer to a saltine than anything sweet. Crushed saltines or unseasoned panko both work; toss with melted butter, about a tablespoon per half cup of crumbs.
- Mushrooms under glassThe glass bell was above all a serving device; the recipe has the dish baked covered and then sent to table still sealed, so the aroma arrived with it. A small covered ramekin or an inverted heatproof bowl does the same job.
- The second variant is incomplete"Mushrooms under Glass II" gives quantities and then stops. The ingredients suggest the first version with lemon juice, parsley and a splash of sherry added to the cream, though the method is not printed. The "14 teaspoon" is a slip for 1/4 teaspoon.
- YieldTwelve stuffed caps serve four as a first course, or six to eight passed with drinks. The cream-and-toast versions are built one baking dish per person.
Stuffed mushrooms of this type descend from the French duxelles "emdash" mushroom stems and shallot cooked down in butter "emdash" and this version keeps the method while binding it with flour and stock in the American fashion. That mushrooms appear at all in the Vegetables chapter is worth noting: commercial mushroom growing in the United States was still young when this book was compiled, concentrated in greenhouses and purpose-built mushroom houses around Kennett Square and Chester County in southeastern Pennsylvania, and the fruit was expensive enough to be treated as a delicacy rather than a staple. Hence the fuss of "under glass": the special dishes with bell-shaped covers, bought from "first-class kitchen furnishers," existed to make a small quantity of mushrooms into an occasion, and the practice of sending them to table sealed was as much theatre as it was flavour preservation.