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Baked Mushrooms in Cups
Peel and cut off the stalks of a dozen or more large flat mushrooms, and chop them fine. Put the trimmings in a stewpan with some water or clear gravy, and boil well. When nicely flavored strain the liquor, return it to the stewpan with the mushrooms and a moderate quantity of finely-chopped parsley, season to taste with salt and pepper, and boil gently at the side of the fire for nearly three-quarters of an hour. Beat four eggs well in one-half teacupful of cream, and strain. When the mushrooms are ready, move the stewpan away from the fire, and stir in the beaten eggs. Butter some small cups or moulds, fill each with the above mixture and bake in a brisk oven. Prepare some white sauce; when baked turn the mushrooms out of the moulds onto a hot dish, pour the sauce round them, and serve.
A savoury mushroom custard baked in dariole moulds and turned out under white sauce. The recipe assumes a cook who knows how custard behaves; the two places it will fail are the temperature of the mixture when the eggs go in, and the heat of the oven.
- The hinge: cool the mushrooms before the eggs"Move the stewpan away from the fire, and stir in the beaten eggs" is doing a great deal of work. The mushroom mixture must drop well below simmering — hand-warm — or the eggs will curdle into threads and the custard will never set smooth.
- "A brisk oven" is wrong for custard"A brisk oven" is hot for a custard -- brisk (or quick) is usually reckoned somewhere around 400F or above, though the term was never fixed; that much heat will blow a small egg custard into a sponge and weep liquid. Bake these at 325-350F, and stand the moulds in a pan of hot water so the sides set at the same rate as the centre. Reckon 25-35 minutes for small cups; the custard should be just firm at the edge with a slight tremble in the middle.
- Half a teacupful of creamA "teacupful" in nineteenth-century books is reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 6 fl oz, so half is somewhere between a scant quarter-cup and a third of a cup; the figure is genuinely loose. Four eggs to that little cream is a very stiff ratio, which is what allows the custards to unmould without collapsing.
- Three-quarters of an hour on the mushroomsThat is not a mistake; the long gentle cooking concentrates the flavour of the liquor. Keep the pan barely bubbling -- "the side of the fire" means the cooler edge of a coal range, i.e. your lowest burner setting.
- "Clear gravy"Unthickened brown stock, not the flour-bound sauce the word suggests today. Beef or veal stock is closer to the intent than chicken; plain water works, with a little less depth.
- Large flat mushroomsOpen-cap field or portobello mushrooms, gills exposed. They give more flavour and darker liquor than button mushrooms, which will make a pale, bland custard. The peeled skins and stalks are the flavour base for the stock, so do not discard them.
- White sauceA plain béchamel — butter and flour cooked without colour, milk or a milk-and-stock blend, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. Make it loose enough to pour and pool around the moulds rather than sit on them.
- Yield and serviceA dozen large mushrooms and four eggs fill six to eight dariole or small ramekin moulds. Butter them heavily and, if you want a clean turn-out, line the bases with buttered paper. Serves four as a first course or savoury.
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