Home › French Recipes › Mushrooms Au Gratin
Mushrooms Au Gratin
½ pound mushrooms
I/2 cup bread-crums
I sliced onion
1/16 teaspoon pepper
2 tablespoons cooking oil
¼ teaspoon paprika
2 tablespoons flour
1 tablespoon butter
1 cup mushroom stock (made ½ teaspoon salt from stems)
Juice of I lemon
Peel the mushrooms and sprinkle salt over them to extract the water. Fry the onion in the oil. Add the flour and brown; add the stock and seasonings and cook the sauce until it is thickened. Drain the mushrooms and add them to the sauce. Put into a baking-dish, sprinkle with crums and bake until the crums are slightly browned.
A simple brown-sauce gratin that depends almost entirely on the mushroom stock made from the trimmings. The ingredient list was set in two columns and reads scrambled; the method is clear enough to follow.
- Make the stock firstThe recipe calls for a cup of stock "made from stems" but never tells you to make it. Simmer the trimmings and stems in a cup or so of water for 15-20 minutes and strain before you start the sauce, or the roux will sit waiting.
- Skip the peelingPeeling mushrooms was standard when they arrived field-gathered and gritty. Cultivated button or cremini mushrooms need only a wipe with a damp cloth; peeling costs you flavour and some of the cap.
- Salting the mushroomsSalting draws out water so the gratin does not turn soupy. Twenty minutes in a colander is enough, and the drained liquid is worth adding to the stock rather than discarding.
- 1/16 teaspoonThat is a pinch of pepper, no more; treat it as seasoning to taste.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. The sauce is cooked, but the mushrooms go in raw, so the bake has to cook them through as well as brown the crumbs: around 400F for 20 minutes or so.
- Bread-crumsToss the crumbs with the tablespoon of butter, which is otherwise unassigned in the method, so they brown evenly instead of scorching in patches.
- The lemonThe juice of one lemon appears in the list but never in the instructions. Stir it into the finished sauce off the heat; a whole lemon in one cup of sauce is assertive, so add it by degrees.
- YieldHalf a pound of mushrooms serves two or three as a side dish, or two on toast as a light supper.
Au gratin means only that a dish is finished with a browned crust, usually crumbs or cheese, in a shallow dish; the word gratin comes from the French for the scrapings off the pan. Notably there is no cheese here at all, which is closer to the original French sense than the cheese-bound casseroles the term now suggests in English. The insistence on peeling mushrooms and salting them dates the recipe: cultivated mushroom growing was still a young industry in the United States, and cooks were used to caps that came with dirt, tough skins and a good deal of water in them.