No. 2762

Mushrooms Stuffed in Cases with Madeira—Mousserons

Champignons Mousserons Farcis en Caisses au Madere

Procure twelve mushrooms, each an inch and three-quarters in diameter; remove both peel and stalks; wash and with a vegetable spoon (Fig. 91) scoop out the centers until the firm mushroom meat is reached, then wash the whole, and chop up the stalks. Have some hot butter and in it fry a little shallot, parsley and truffles, all well chopped; season with salt, pepper and nutmeg, and dilute with half a pint of well reduced allemande sauce (No. 407); fill the insides of the mushroom heads with this dressing. Prepare paper cases the same size as the mushroom heads, coat them with oil, and stiffen in the oven; into each case place a little Madeira wine, and one mushroom with the stuffed side uppermost; bestrew with bread-crumbs, pour over a little butter, and bake in the oven; when done to a fine color baste with Colbert sauce (No. 451), and serve.

← No. 2761 Mushrooms Served Under a Glass Cover and wit Mushrooms & Truffles No. 2763 Okra or Gumbo, Garnished with Barley Bechame →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer assumes two sauces made elsewhere in the book, so the real work here is upstream of the mushrooms. Read the sauce entries first and reduce the allemande hard — a loose filling will run out of the caps and soak the paper cases.

Mushroom sizeAn inch and three-quarters across is a large white or cremini cap, roughly what supermarkets sell as "stuffing mushrooms." Removing the peel is optional by modern practice, and a wipe with a damp cloth will do in place of the washing the original directs.
Vegetable spoonFig. 91 is a scoop of the type now sold as a melon baller. A teaspoon or a small parisienne cutter hollows the cap just as well; stop while there is still firm flesh under the scoop or the cap collapses in the oven.
Allemande sauceNo. 407 is a velouté finished with egg yolks and lemon — essentially a thick chicken or veal sauce, egg-enriched. Half a pint is one cup; note that the recipe asks for half a pint of allemande already well reduced, not for reducing the sauce further once it is in the pan.
Colbert sauceNo. 451 is a butter sauce built on meat glaze with lemon and chopped tarragon. If you have no glace de viande, a strongly reduced brown stock whisked with cold butter, lemon juice and tarragon gives the same effect.
TrufflesTruffle is a luxury purchase now. A small quantity of chopped rehydrated dried porcini in the duxelles gets the savoury depth; truffle oil does not, and reads as artificial against the butter and Madeira.
Paper casesCut parchment rounds or use small paper baking cups, brush with oil and set them in a 350F oven for a few minutes until they hold their shape. Baking them in a muffin tin keeps them upright once the Madeira goes in.
Oven and timingBake at about 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, until the crumbs are browned and the mushrooms have released their liquid. Only the filling has been cooked beforehand — the caps themselves go in raw and need the time to cook through.
YieldTwelve cases serve four to six as a hot hors d'oeuvre, or six as a garnish beside roast poultry or a plain grilled steak.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry is a fair sample of the house style: a vegetable treated as elaborately as a game bird, served in its own individual paper case. Mousserons is a French term applied to several small wild mushrooms, the St. George's mushroom among them, though Ranhofer applies the word loosely to cultivated mushrooms — commercial mushroom growing was just becoming established in the United States in this period. The chopped stalks fried with shallot, parsley and truffle are a duxelles in all but name, bound here with allemande rather than left dry, and the finish with Madeira and Colbert sauce marks the dish as a savoury course rather than a plain vegetable: two compound sauces and a wine for twelve mushrooms is restaurant arithmetic, not household economy.