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Mushrooms au Gratin
1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 2 tablespoonfuls chopped cooked meat 2 tablespoonfuls breadcrumbs to taste 1/2 cupful stock 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 14 large mushrooms 1 egg Salt, pepper, and red pepper 1 tablespoonful chopped suet Beat up egg, add suet, breadcrumbs, meat, parsley, and seasonings. Wash and remove centers from mushrooms, season with salt, pepper, and red pepper, also place tiny piece of Crisco in each. Then put heaping teaspoonful of forcemeat in each one, and cover with crumbs. Lay on Criscoed tin, add stock, and bake fifteen minutes. Serve on hot dish with gravy poured round.
Sufficient for fourteen mushrooms.
A stuffed-mushroom recipe from a Crisco promotional cookbook, written when "au gratin" meant little more than a crumb topping. The instructions assume you know how hot your oven should be, so the numbers below fill the gaps.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, which is typical of the period. Fifteen minutes implies a fairly brisk oven, around 400F; large caps may want 20 minutes before the filling is set and the crumbs coloured.
- Crisco and the suetCrisco was new in 1911 and this book exists to sell it, so it appears in quantities a modern cook would trim. Any neutral fat or butter works; the tablespoon of chopped suet in the forcemeat is there for moisture and can be replaced with butter or a little finely chopped fatty bacon.
- Red pepperMeans cayenne, not paprika and not sweet pepper. A pinch is enough for fourteen mushrooms.
- The mushrooms"Large mushrooms" of the era would often have been flat field mushrooms, though cultivated caps were also on sale by 1913; portobello or large cremini caps are a reasonable modern equivalent. "Remove centers" means pull out the stems, which the recipe does not tell you what to do with, but they can be chopped into the forcemeat rather than discarded.
- Chopped cooked meatThis is a leftovers recipe. Cold roast beef, lamb, ham or chicken all suit; mince it fine so a heaping teaspoonful holds together.
- The stock and the "gravy"The half cup of stock goes in the tin, not over the mushrooms, and becomes the sauce as it reduces with the mushroom juices. It is the hinge of the dish: too shallow a pan and it dries to nothing, too much liquid and the crumb tops soften. Use a tin just large enough to hold the caps in one layer.
- BreadcrumbsTwo tablespoons go into the filling; the crumbs for covering are extra and unmeasured. Dry crumbs brown better than fresh here, since fifteen minutes is not long.
- YieldThe recipe says only "Sufficient for fourteen mushrooms." As a modern estimate, fourteen caps would serve four to six as a vegetable course or side, three or four as a starter.
The Story of Crisco (1913), credited to Marion Harris Neil, was Procter & Gamble's cookbook for a product that had only reached shops in 1911: a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening sold as a clean, odourless, all-purpose substitute for both butter and lard. That commercial purpose explains why Crisco is called for at four tablespoonfuls in a dish of stuffed mushrooms, greasing the tin and dotting the caps. Stuffed field mushrooms filled with forcemeat were a familiar English treatment before the shortening existed, and the surviving tablespoon of chopped suet points to the older fats the book was trying to displace. Mushrooms may still have been a seasonal or gathered item in some households at this date, though cultivated supply was growing.