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Stuffed Fresh Mushrooms
Remove the tails (and keep them) from a pound of very fresh, good-sized, sound mushrooms, wash in cold water and carefully drain on a cloth. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, place them in pan one beside another and cook for three minutes on each side. Squeeze over juice of half a sound lemon, sprinkle over a half teaspoon salt, toss well and keep on a plate till required. Thoroughly wash the mushroom tails, chop very fine, place in a small saucepan with an ounce of butter, three finely chopped shallots, one ounce chopped raw ham, a half bean chopped garlic, and gently brown for ten minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Add one tablespoon flour, stir well, pour in a gill cream, three saltspoons salt, one saltspoon cayenne and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, then add two tablespoons fresh bread crumbs, one egg yolk, and mix well while heating for three minutes. Transfer this preparation to a plate and let get cold, then stuff mushrooms with the preparation, neatly smooth tops, carefully dip in melted butter, then in bread crumbs, place on a tin, set in oven for eight minutes remove and use as directed.
A duxelles-style stuffing bound with cream, crumbs and egg yolk, piped back into pan-cooked caps. The original assumes a professional kitchen and gives no oven temperature, so a few things need pinning down.
- The hinge: cool the filling firstThe recipe says to spread the stuffing on a plate and let it get cold, and that instruction is doing real work. A warm, loose filling will not mound, will not take a smooth top, and will slide off when you dip the caps in butter and crumbs. Chill it until firm, ideally in the refrigerator.
- Tails means stemsTrim the stems out of the caps and keep every one. The recipe chops them fine and makes them the base of the stuffing.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fluid ounces. Heavy cream gives the richest result, though the tablespoon of flour stirred in first will hold a lighter cream together at the boil.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So three saltspoons salt is 3/4 teaspoon, with 1/4 teaspoon each of cayenne and nutmeg. The cayenne at that level is assertive; scale it back if you are cautious.
- A half bean of garlicPeriod phrasing for half a clove. Not half a head.
- Raw hamAn uncooked dry-cured ham: prosciutto, serrano, or a piece of speck. One ounce, chopped fine. American "raw ham" in the fresh-pork sense is not what is wanted and would need proper cooking.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Eight minutes implies a hot oven; something in the region of 425F is a reasonable modern guess for browning the crumb coating in that time. The filling is already cooked, so you are only crisping and heating through.
- Washing mushroomsThe instruction to wash in cold water and drain on a cloth is fine for caps that will be seared immediately, but drain them thoroughly. Wet mushrooms steam rather than brown in the three minutes a side allotted.
- YieldA pound of good-sized caps should give somewhere around 12 to 16 stuffed mushrooms, enough for four as a first course or eight as a canape. "Use as directed" points to other recipes in the book rather than to any serving instruction here.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906). Filippini spent decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe reads like a professional's: weights rather than counts, saltspoon measures, and a closing "use as directed" that assumes the cook is assembling a larger plate. The stuffing itself is essentially a duxelles, the finely chopped mushroom-and-shallot preparation of French cookery generally credited by tradition to the household of the Marquis d'Uxelles in the seventeenth century, here enriched into a panade with cream, crumbs and an egg yolk so that it will hold a shape. The addition of raw cured ham and a pinch of cayenne is characteristic of Filippini, whose books moved freely between French technique and the broader repertoire an American hotel kitchen of the period was expected to produce.