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Mushroom Pie
Peel and cut in quarters some mushrooms, also peel some potatoes; butter a pie-dish, put in a layer of potatoes, then a layer of mushrooms, another of potatoes, and so on until they are all used, seasoning each layer with salt, pepper and butter. Cover the pie with a crust and bake in a moderate oven. Put the trimmings of the mushrooms in a small quantity of gravy and boil for several minutes, then strain the liquid and season with salt and pepper. When the pie is cooked make a small incision in the top and pour in the gravy.
Oscar gives no quantities and no times, which was normal for a professional book of 1896 — the reader was assumed to be a cook. The two things that decide whether this works are the thickness of the potato slices and the moment the gravy goes in.
- Slice the potatoes thinRaw potato is the slow element here; mushrooms are cooked in minutes. Cut them no thicker than 1/8 inch so they are tender by the time the crust colours, and season each layer as directed rather than at the end.
- "A moderate oven"350F. At that heat a 9-inch pie-dish filled as described needs about 1 hour to 1 hour 15 minutes; test through the vent with a skewer for potato, not by the look of the crust.
- QuantitiesFor a 9-inch dish, roughly 1 1/2 lb potatoes and 1 lb mushrooms, about 3 tablespoons butter distributed through the layers, and enough pastry for a single top crust. Serves four to six as a supper dish.
- Don't peel the mushroomsPeeling was standard practice when field and cultivated mushrooms arrived gritty and thick-skinned. Modern cultivated mushrooms need only wiping. Keep the stems and any trimmings for the gravy, which is what the recipe wants them for.
- What "gravy" meansIn nineteenth-century kitchen usage "gravy" generally meant brown meat stock or the strained juices from a roast rather than a flour-thickened pan gravy. Simmer the trimmings in about a cup of it, strain, and season; a good beef or veal stock reduced slightly will do the same job. This is not a vegetarian dish unless you substitute a dark mushroom stock.
- Vent the crustA sealed crust over wet potato and mushroom can lift and split. Cut a small hole before baking, then widen it for the gravy at the end.
- The hinge: gravy goes in after bakingPoured in at the start it would steam the vegetables and soak the pastry from below. Add it hot, through a funnel, as soon as the pie leaves the oven, then let the pie stand five to ten minutes so the liquid distributes before cutting.
Oscar Tschirky was never technically the chef of the Waldorf — his title was maître d'hôtel — but the 1896 book that carries his name gathered the hotel's working repertoire, and this pie belongs to its plainer English side rather than its French one. Layered potato-and-mushroom pies under a single crust are often said to have been familiar British kitchen fare, and the instruction to simmer the peelings and stalks for a gravy poured in through a slit at the end is a thrifty move of the kind generally associated with the period: nothing edible discarded, and the pastry kept dry until the last minute. That mushrooms could be called for by the pound at all reflects a recent change. Commercial mushroom growing in cellars, caves and purpose-built houses was taking hold in the United States in the closing decades of the century, making more available what had been largely a foraged luxury.