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Mushroom Patties
Butter and line some small patty-pans with good paste, fill them with uncooked rice, and bake. Trim some button-mushrooms, drain, and chop them; then put them in a stewpan with a lump of butter, and toss about until they are fried. Thicken one cupful of cold water with a little flour, pour it over the mushrooms, add a tablespoonful of cream, and a few drops of broth, season with salt and pepper, and a little lemon juice. Stir with a wooden spoon and boil for a few minutes. When cooked, turn the rice out of the patties, and fill with the above mixture.
A blind-baked pastry shell filled with creamed mushrooms, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen where quantities were assumed. A few things need spelling out.
- Patty-pansSmall round tins roughly 2 to 2.5 inches across — a standard muffin tin or tartlet tins do the job. The recipe never says how many mushrooms, so the yield is guesswork; perhaps eight to twelve shells.
- "Good paste"A plain short pastry, or puff if you want the classic bouchée effect. About 12 oz of dough lines a dozen small tins.
- Baking blindThe uncooked rice is pie weights, and the technique is unchanged. Line the pastry with parchment first, or the grains stick to the raw dough. Bake at 400F until the sides are set, then lift out rice and paper and return the shells for a few minutes to dry the bases.
- The thickening"Thicken one cupful of cold water with a little flour" means a slurry — about 1 tablespoon flour whisked smooth into the cold water. Cold is deliberate: it prevents lumps when it hits the hot pan.
- "A few drops of broth"Probably something concentrated, since 'drops' implies strength — a reduced stock or meat glaze. A teaspoon of good demi-glace, or a scant quarter-teaspoon of bouillon paste, gives a similar savoury depth. Vegetable stock works if you want it meatless.
- Frying the mushroomsChopped mushrooms release a lot of water. Toss them over fairly high heat until that liquid has evaporated and they begin to colour — otherwise the finished filling is thin and grey. The recipe's "until they are fried" assumes this.
- Boiling the sauce"Boil for a few minutes" is needed to cook out the raw flour; two to three minutes of gentle bubbling is enough. The cream and lemon juice are best stirred in near the end so the acid does not curdle the cream over sustained heat.
- Assembly and timingFill at the last moment. The shells soften within minutes of meeting the sauce.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) records the repertoire of a New York hotel kitchen working in the French manner, and this is essentially a small bouchée aux champignons — a filled pastry case of the sort that circulated at receptions. Filling an unbaked tart shell with rice or dried beans to hold its shape was already old practice by then, and the recipe simply directs that the rice be turned out of the patties. The vagueness about quantities is characteristic of the book: it was written down from and for cooks who judged a sauce by how it coated the spoon, not by the cup.