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Baked Stuffed Mushrooms
Choose mushrooms of a medium size, and cut out all the stalks or stems; wash these and chop them fine; mince two shallots, and put them in a stewpan with plenty of butter, and fry; then stir in one tablespoonful of flour and the minced stalks. Add a moderate quantity of finely-chopped parsley, season to taste with pepper and salt, and stir over the fire for a few minutes, moistening with a small quantity of stock. Fill the hollow part of each mushroom with the above mixture; butter a baking-dish, lay the mushrooms side by side in it, the open part uppermost, strew over plenty of finely-grated breadcrumbs and place them in a brisk oven for a quarter of an hour. Arrange the mushrooms carefully on a hot dish, over which has been spread a folded napkin, or an ornamental dish-paper, garnish with fried parsley, and serve.
A straightforward duxelles-style stuffing, and the method holds up unchanged. The only real decisions are oven heat and how much moisture you leave in the pan.
- Oven heatA "brisk" oven is generally taken as roughly 400-450F. Fifteen minutes at that heat should brown the crumbs and cook the caps through; at lower heats the mushrooms are more likely to weep and the topping to stay pale.
- Mushroom choiceOscar's "medium size" means cultivated white mushrooms around 1.5-2 inches across, large enough to hold a spoonful of filling. Cremini work identically. Remove the stems by twisting rather than cutting, which leaves a deeper hollow.
- Keep the filling dryThis is the hinge. The stems release a lot of liquid, so cook them until the pan is nearly dry before adding the flour, and add the stock a spoonful at a time. A wet filling slides out of the caps and steams the crumbs instead of crisping them.
- Shallots and butterTwo shallots is roughly 2 tablespoons minced. "Plenty of butter" here is about 2 tablespoons for that quantity of shallot and stems; the flour needs fat to absorb.
- Breadcrumbs"Finely-grated" means dry crumbs grated from stale bread, not the soft fresh kind. Dry crumbs, or panko, brown properly in fifteen minutes. Dotting the tops with a little butter helps colour them.
- Fried parsleyWhole flat-leaf sprigs, patted thoroughly dry, dropped into 350F fat for 10-15 seconds until they stop sputtering and turn brilliant green. Wet parsley spits violently; dry it well.
- YieldThe recipe gives no mushroom count, and the filling is made largely from the caps' own stems, so it scales with however many you buy; the shallot, flour and stock as written suit a couple of dozen medium caps at most.
- The napkinFolded napkins and ornamental dish-papers under baked or fried items were common in service of the period; the napkin absorbs any butter that runs out and gives the mushrooms something to sit on. A paper doily or nothing at all serves the same purpose.
Stuffed mushrooms of this kind rest on duxelles — mushrooms, shallot and parsley cooked down in butter — a preparation associated with the seventeenth-century French kitchen and traditionally said to be named for the Marquis d'Uxelles, whose cook La Varenne wrote Le Cuisinier François (1651); the term itself does not appear in La Varenne's book, and the naming is tradition rather than documented fact. By the time Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, cultivated mushrooms grown in cellars and caves were increasingly available to New York hotels alongside wild ones. The finishing touches — the folded napkin, the ornamental dish-paper, the fried parsley — are characteristic hotel service of the period, when a plate leaving a professional kitchen was expected to look composed rather than merely hot.