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March 3
Menu: Vegetarian; Grilled Mushrooms; Vegetable Soup; Cheese Omelet; Baked Beans; Iced Asparagus; Fruit in Jelly; Coffee Grilled Mushrooms-1 cup mushrooms, pepper and salt to taste, Crisco, and lemon juice. Carefully peel the mushrooms, cut off a portion of stalk, and season with salt. Broil them over a clear fire, turning them once, and arrange them on a very hot dish. Put a small piece of Crisco on each mushroom, season with pepper and salt to taste, and squeeze over them a few drops of lemon juice.
A single line from the March calendar in Procter & Gamble's 1913 Crisco booklet, written when mushrooms were still mostly a field crop and "broiling" meant live coals. Little needs changing beyond the fat and the fire.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, launched two years before this book. A pat of butter on each hot mushroom does the same job with far better flavour; olive oil brushed on before grilling also works.
- "A clear fire"This means coals that have burned down past flame and smoke, so the mushrooms take heat rather than soot. A gas or charcoal grill at medium-high, a ridged grill pan, or an oven broiler with the rack about four inches from the element are all equivalent.
- Do not peelPeeling made sense for large open field mushrooms with tough, grubby skins. Cultivated creminis and portobellos should only be wiped with a damp cloth; peeling costs flavour and structure. Do scrape the dark gills from a big portobello if you want to avoid black juices on the plate.
- TimingThree to four minutes a side for medium caps, longer for a thick portobello, until the flesh gives easily and beads with liquid. Grill gill-side up first so the juices collect rather than drip into the fire.
- SaltingThe recipe salts before grilling, which pulls water to the surface and slows browning. Salt lightly at the start or, better, only at the end with the pepper and lemon.
- "1 cup mushrooms"Roughly 3 ounces of sliced or small whole caps, or one large portobello. The recipe states no yield.
- The hot dishThe instruction to use a very hot plate is the one worth keeping. Grilled mushrooms shed liquid and go tepid within a minute; warm the platter, and add the fat and lemon at the table so the aroma survives.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook for a product introduced in 1911: cottonseed oil hydrogenated into a solid white fat that behaved like lard but carried no animal origin and, so the advertising claimed, did not turn rancid on the shelf. The recipes were compiled by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, and the "Calendar of Dinners" gave a dish for every day of the year so a housekeeper could open the book to the date and find Crisco already written into the menu. Grilled mushrooms belong to a British-inflected tradition that reached American tables through breakfast and savoury courses, where field mushrooms gathered in autumn pastures were broiled over coals and dressed with nothing more than butter, pepper and lemon. The instruction to peel them is a habit of the period's kitchens, one that cookbooks went on repeating for decades.