Home › The World's Kitchen › Scrambled Eggs with Mushrooms
Scrambled Eggs with Mushrooms
Have the same amount of eggs and other ingredients in a bowl adding, en plus, four canned mushrooms very finely minced; beat up the whole together and proceed to finish the eggs exactly the same.
This is a variation entry, not a standalone recipe: it assumes you have just read the plain scrambled egg method on the preceding page and are only adding mushrooms to it. Everything you need to supply is in the base method.
- The missing base recipeThe entry refers back to a plain scrambled egg method printed earlier, which is not reproduced here, so the quantities are unknown. If you are working without it, any standard scrambled egg base -- eggs, salt, pepper and butter, with a little cream if you like them soft -- will serve; the figures are the editor's suggestion, not the book's.
- "En plus"French for "in addition": the mushrooms go in on top of the standard quantities, and nothing is removed to make room for them.
- Canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms were a reliable year-round option and were commonly sold as small whole buttons in brine. Drain and blot them dry, or the packing liquid will thin the eggs; a like quantity of fresh mushrooms, minced and sauteed in butter until the pan is dry again, gives more flavour.
- The hinge: low heatBeating raw mushroom mince into the eggs means extra moisture, so the pan must stay gentle. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, and pull the pan off while the curds are still visibly loose — they finish setting off the heat. High heat here will squeeze out water and leave you with eggs sitting in a grey puddle.
- Don't let them dryOlder scrambled egg instructions often produce a firmer result than modern taste allows. Over low heat, a small panful needs only a few minutes; stop while they are still loose.
- YieldThe recipe gives no egg count, so the yield depends on the base method it refers back to. Four minced canned mushrooms are enough to season a small panful of eggs; scale the mushrooms up or down with the eggs.
Scrambled eggs with a chopped garnish beaten straight into the raw egg — mushroom, truffle, ham, herbs, tomato — may be why this book presents egg dishes as one-line variants on a single method: a cook memorised the base and swapped the addition. Canned mushrooms are the period detail worth noticing. Commercial mushroom cultivation in caves and cellars, long associated with the outskirts of Paris, is generally credited with making buttons cheap enough to preserve in tins by the late nineteenth century; fresh mushrooms were a seasonal and often foraged item, while the can sat on the shelf all year. A recipe that calls for "four canned mushrooms" as a matter of course is telling you that the tin, not the market basket, was the default.