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Mushrooms in Cases
Peel and chop some large mushrooms, mix with them one tablespoonful of chopped parsley, and a little finely-chopped shallot and season with salt and pepper. Butter the interior of some small paper cases, fill them with the mushroom mixture and bake in a brisk oven.
A one-paragraph French savoury of the 1890s, written for a cook who already knew what a paper case was and how long anything stayed in the oven. The gaps are worth filling.
- "Brisk oven"Read that as a hot oven, roughly 400-425F. The book gives no temperatures or times, so treat this as an estimate: small cases will likely want somewhere around 12-15 minutes, until the mushrooms are sizzling and their edges have browned.
- Paper casesThese are caisses, pleated cups of stiff paper set on a baking sheet. Use parchment cases or small parchment-lined ramekins; ordinary decorative paper cups and cupcake liners scorch and are not made for direct oven heat. Butter them well, as the recipe insists, or the filling welds itself to the paper.
- Skip the peelingPeeling mushrooms was routine instruction in Victorian cookery books. Modern button, cremini or portobello caps need only wiping and trimming.
- The water problemThis is the hinge. Raw chopped mushrooms shed a great deal of liquid, and in a shallow case that liquid pools and steams the filling grey. Chop them fairly coarse rather than fine, and consider drawing off some moisture in a hot dry pan first so what goes into the case is already concentrated.
- Butter is doing double dutyThe buttered case is the only fat here. A dot of butter on top of each filled case helps the surface brown and keeps the mushrooms from drying at the edges.
- Shallot quantity"A little finely-chopped shallot" means about a teaspoon for every large handful of mushrooms. More than that and the allium dominates a dish whose whole point is mushroom.
- Yield and servingLarge mushrooms, say roughly 12 oz chopped, should fill about six small cases; the recipe gives no yield. These were served hot as a savoury course or a light entree, and are best brought straight from the oven in their cases.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name fronted this 1896 book, ran a dining room built on French service, and en caisse is straight out of that vocabulary: a small pleated paper case used both as cooking vessel and serving dish, common for hot hors d'oeuvre and savouries in the late nineteenth century. The dish also reflects a shift in supply. Cultivated mushrooms, grown in caves and cellars in France and increasingly in the United States by the 1890s, had moved from a costly garnish to something a hotel kitchen could chop by the pound. A recipe this bare, with no cream, no crumb and no stock, depends entirely on the quality of the mushrooms themselves.