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January 19
Menu: Consomme with Vermicelli; Grated Parmesan Cheese; Fried Oysters, Sauce Tartare; Mushrooms Cooked Under Glass Bells; Supreme of Chicken; Asparagus, Cream Glacé; Orange Ice; Coffee; Mushrooms Cooked Under Glass Bells-Saute 1/2 pound of peeled mushroom caps in 3 tablespoons Crisco, season with salt and paprika, add 1 cup of cream, cover and let simmer until reduced a little. Arrange mushrooms on round of bread in mushroom dish, pour liquid over, cover with glass bell and bake 20 minutes in moderate oven. Send to table without removing glass, which confines delicate flavor and aroma of mushrooms.
A simple cream saute dressed up by its serving vessel. The glass bell is the whole point of the dish, and it is also the part that needs the most thought in a modern kitchen.
- The glass bellThese were sold as service ware with matching "mushroom dishes," though how well the period glass stood up to a 20-minute bake is not recorded. Ordinary modern glassware is not a substitute — decorative bells and cake domes are annealed for display, not for oven heat, and can shatter. Use a borosilicate or tempered dome sold as oven-safe, or bake the dish uncovered and set a clean glass cloche over it at the table.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as about 350F, though period usage ran 350-375F. The mushrooms are already cooked through by this point; the oven time is only to set the cream and hold the aroma under the dome.
- CriscoThe book is an advertisement for hydrogenated shortening, so it appears everywhere. Butter is the better fat here — 3 tablespoons — since nothing about a cream-and-mushroom sauce benefits from a neutral shortening.
- Peeled mushroom capsPeeling was standard for the large flat field mushrooms of the period. Modern cultivated white or cremini caps need only wiping; peel only if you are using very large open-gilled portobellos and want to avoid the dark bleed into the cream.
- Reducing the creamMushrooms shed a good deal of liquid, so simmer uncovered rather than covered once they have released it, or the sauce will be thin. You want it just thick enough to coat, since it reduces further in the oven.
- The round of breadToast or fry it first. Untoasted bread collapses under a cup of cream sauce and twenty minutes of baking.
- YieldHalf a pound of caps and a cup of cream serves two as a first course, or one as the savoury course it was probably intended to be.
This belongs to the brief vogue for cooking "under glass" that ran through American hotel and club cookery in the first decades of the twentieth century — squab under glass was the famous version, mushrooms the affordable one. The claim made for it, repeated here, was that the bell trapped the volatile aromatics so that they met the diner rather than the dining room; the theatre of lifting the dome at the table was at least half the appeal. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco (1913) says something about the book's ambitions: Procter & Gamble were not only introducing a new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening but arguing that it belonged in refined cooking, and the volume's "Calendar of Dinners" assigns a dish to every day of the year to prove the point. January 20 gets mushrooms under glass.