Home › The World's Kitchen › Fresh Mushrooms Au Gratin
Fresh Mushrooms Au Gratin
Clip off a little of the tips of stalks of a pound very fresh, white, even-sized, medium, fresh mushrooms. Thoroughly wash them in plenty of cold water and thoroughly dry them on a cloth. Heat one ounce butter in a small frying pan, add the mushrooms, season with a teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper and gently brown ten minutes, lightly tossing meanwhile. Lift up the mushrooms with a skimmer and keep on a plate. Add one and a half ounces flour to the mushroom butter in pan, briskly stir while heating one minute, pour in one gill hot milk, two tablespoons sherry, one gill cream, half a saltspoon cayenne and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Sharply mix with a whisk until it comes to a boil, add the mushrooms and slowly cook ten minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Transfer to a baking dish, dredge a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese over, place a few little bits of butter on top, set to bake in the oven for ten minutes, remove and serve.
A straightforward mushroom gratin in the old restaurant idiom, written in ounces and saltspoons and assuming a cook who knows what a béchamel should look like. A few conversions and one adjustment of proportion are all it needs.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the sauce takes 1/2 cup hot milk and 1/2 cup cream. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon: three saltspoons of white pepper is 3/4 teaspoon, and the cayenne is a scant 1/8 teaspoon.
- WeightsOne ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; 1 1/2 ounces of flour is about 1/3 cup. That is a heavy roux for the cup of liquid here, and the sauce is likely to set very stiff in the oven. Two tablespoons of flour gives a coating consistency that still holds the mushrooms.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the recipe says only to set the dish in the oven. To gild the cheese in ten minutes you want a hot oven, around 425F, or a few minutes under the broiler.
- Washing the mushroomsThe instruction to dry them thoroughly on a cloth is the hinge of the dish. Wet mushrooms steam in the pan instead of browning, and the ten minutes of gentle browning is where the flavour comes from.
- The saltA full teaspoon of salt goes onto the mushrooms before any is added to the sauce, and Parmesan follows. Salt lightly at the pan stage and correct the sauce at the end.
- SherryDry or medium-dry sherry, not cream sherry. It goes into the pan with the hot milk and the cream and cooks through the subsequent twenty minutes, so most of the alcohol will have driven off by serving.
- YieldA pound of mushrooms in this quantity of sauce serves four as a first course or a side, two as a supper dish on toast.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when American cookery writing still took its bearings from the professional French kitchen, and this recipe shows it: brown the garnish first, build a béchamel in the same fat, return the garnish, finish with cheese and butter under a fierce heat. Au gratin refers strictly to that browned crust — from the French gratter, to scrape, originally the crisp scrapings from the dish — and only later came to mean, in English usage, anything baked with cheese. Cultivated white mushrooms were a comparatively expensive commodity when this was written, grown in caves and cellars, and the instructions treat a single pound with care: washing, drying, trimming the stalk tips and browning them in a small pan by themselves before they meet the sauce.