Part 21

=Mushroom Patties.=--Dried or fresh mushrooms, light pastry, milk, seasoning, flour, and butter.

Put the mushrooms (if dried, they must be soaked overnight) with two ounces of butter into a saucepan; simmer slowly till they shrink and give out their juice; stir in an ounce of flour, add a cup of milk, stir gently for five minutes, let it remain for half an hour, and season with pepper and salt. Line patty-pans with pastry, fill with the mushroom mixture, and bake.

=Mushrooms à la Provençale.=--Slice off that part of the tomato that adheres to the stalk; scoop out the seeds without breaking the sides of the fruit, and place them in a circular order in a sauté pan containing about a gill of salad oil; next chop up half a bottle of mushrooms, a little parsley, and four shallots; put these into a stewpan, season with pepper and salt, and add a little chopped thyme; fry these for about five minutes, then mix in three yolks of eggs; fill the tomatoes with this preparation; shake some light-coloured raspings of bread over them, and place them over a brisk fire, holding a red-hot salamander over them for about ten minutes, by which time they will be done; dish them up; pour some brown sauce round the base, and serve.

=Cream Mushrooms.=--Peel one pound of fresh mushrooms, cut off the stalks. Beat up two ounces of butter in a sauté pan or a stewpan; put in the mushrooms, season with salt and pepper, and cook over a moderate fire for ten minutes, then add half a pint of cream or milk and cream. Bake for about five minutes, and thicken with one ounce of butter kneaded with half an ounce of flour. Dish up, and serve hot.

=Mushroom Omelette.=--Take three large mushrooms chopped finely, fry lightly in three ounces of butter. Add three eggs, well beaten, yolks and whites separately, and two tablespoonfuls of milk; season with pepper and salt. Pour into the pan, and fry in hot butter. Fry well both sides.

=Stuffed Mushrooms.=--Wash and chop finely the trimmings and stalks of sixteen large fresh mushrooms, fry the trimmings in oil, and add half a cupful of tomato sauce, with salt and red pepper to season. Add equal parts of fresh bread-crumbs and grated Parmesan cheese until a smooth, thick paste is formed. Season with minced parsley. Fill the mushroom caps, and arrange on a baking dish. Sprinkle with crumbs and grated cheese, moisten with olive oil, and bake for fifteen minutes. Sprinkle with lemon juice and serve.

=Mushroom Rolls.=--Scoop out the crumb from small dinner rolls, cut in half, and fill the cavity with mushroom mixture as follows:

Clean a quarter of a pound of button mushrooms, cut them small, stew them in a small stewpan with one ounce of butter; season with pepper and salt, and when the mushrooms are tender, stir in one ounce of flour mixed to a smooth paste with a gill of cream or milk. Bring the mixture to the boil for a minute or two, and use it just before it is cold.

=Curried Mushrooms.=--Fry a small chopped onion in butter, with a teaspoonful each of flour and curry powder, add a cupful of stock, and cook until thick, stirring constantly. Take from the fire, season with salt and pepper and lemon juice, and strain over fried mushrooms arranged on a buttered dish.

=Broiled Mushrooms.=--(1) Peel some large mushrooms. Broil on a buttered gridiron, inside up. Season and serve on buttered toast. Melted butter, mixed with minced parsley and chives, and seasoned with salt and pepper, may be served separately if desired, or melted butter and lemon juice.

(2) Fry separately in melted butter large fresh mushrooms whole, and fresh mushrooms chopped. Add cream or milk to the minced mushrooms, using enough to cover, and simmer for ten minutes. Spread the minced mixture on buttered toast, and lay a large broiled mushroom on each piece. Season with salt and pepper, and if desired, a little grated nutmeg or lemon juice.

=Baked Mushrooms.=--Peel a dozen large mushrooms, put into a buttered dripping-pan, inside up, sprinkle with salt and pepper, dot with butter, and pour over two-thirds of a cupful of cream. Bake for ten minutes in a hot oven and serve on toast, with some gravy poured over. The cream may be omitted and two tablespoonfuls of butter used instead.

=Scalloped Mushroom.=--Mince some mushrooms rather finely, peel and chop a shallot, melt an ounce of butter and fry it; then add half a gill of tomato sauce, two tablespoonfuls of cream, some bread-crumbs and chopped parsley, and a tablespoonful of sherry, with seasoning to taste. Butter some shells, when the mixture is thoroughly hot pour it into the shells, cover with bread-crumbs and sprinkle with chopped parsley; divide about an ounce and a half of butter into little bits, and put them on to the tops of the filled shells; bake in a very hot oven, so as to brown the surface; dish up in the shells.--Mrs. B. C. Stephenson’s recipe.

MUSTARD (Sinapis alba. Ord. Cruciferæ).

Exactly the same treatment is required for this as for cress. Mustard germinates more quickly than the latter, therefore sow it three days after the accompanying cress.

ONION (Allium cepa. Ord. Liliaceæ).

There is no vegetable, except the potato, more continually in demand in the kitchen than this admirable bulb. It is indispensable in soups, stews, sauces, salads, stuffing, while in its native simplicity, braised, boiled, or fried, it delights many a heart on a cold winter’s day.

The ground that is to carry onions must be deeply trenched and richly manured. This should be done as early in the winter as possible, as the onion must be sown early in the year, and the ground is all the better for being mellowed by frost. A moderate dressing of kainit may be dug into the top spit at the same time that the good stuff from the stable goes into the bottom of the trench.

The ground should be levelled down and a dressing of soot sprinkled over the surface and raked in, and in February or March, as early, indeed, as the season permits, the seed must go in. Choose a dry day when the soil is almost dusty, tread the ground firm, and draw shallow drills across it, a foot apart. The seed must be sown very thinly and evenly, and the drills covered over by means of the rake. This being done the gardener should perform a sort of step dance over the entire bed, treading the ground as firm as possible; indeed, some pass the garden roller over it, but this is an unsafe practice, as if the ground be the least bit damp, earth will stick to the roller, and with it the precious seeds. The bed should be lightly finished with the rake, and left as tidy and smooth as a billiard table.

With the growth of the onions will come an innumerable crop of weeds. In theory these should be hand-weeded, but there is no objection to using the Dutch hoe, once. The hoe must be carefully used, and must not drive deeply into the soil, for the onions must not be loosened. All subsequent weeding must be done by hand.

As soon as the onions are well up, a sprinkling of soot should be administered every two or three weeks. This not only serves as an invaluable manure, but helps to keep the onion grub at bay. One cannot blame the grub for being fond of onions, but one does not desire his presence, as he may easily ruin the entire crop. In showery weather occasional slight top-dressings of nitrate may be given with advantage, say about once a month.

The onions will need to be thinned in May and again during June, and very useful these thinnings are in the salad bowl. The second thinning need not be done all at once, but the bed may be systematically used from as onions are required; be this as it may, by the first week in July there should be a good four inches between each bulb.

About the beginning of September knock the stems down with a rake handle, to induce the bulbs to ripen off, and harvest them in a perfectly dry condition a fortnight later. They should lie on the tool-shed floor, spread out to thoroughly dry off, for a couple of days before being bunched and stored.

There are many good sorts of onions; for the spring sowing a sound, good-keeping bulb is required; Rousham Park Hero, Ailsa Craig, or James’s Long-keeping are all good sorts, but on the whole we prefer the first for the small garden; it yields a sound bulb of good size and quality.

At the same time as the main crop is sown in early spring, a small breadth of the onion bed may usefully be devoted to pickling onions. For this purpose choose such a variety as Silverskin. The seed must be sown thickly and broadcast; the little bulbs should stand cheek by jowl. Hand-weeding alone should be their portion, and they will be ready to harvest in July.

In order to obtain early bulbs of large size, a sowing of a special variety of onion may be made in the open early in August. For this purpose the Tripoli onion or its like is preferred. There is none better than the Trebons onion; it is a most excellent, mild-flavoured bulb, and will keep far into the winter.

The bed chosen for this sowing should be open, dry, and exposed to air and sun. The plants will stand in it through an ordinary English winter, and in early March they should be planted with the trowel in the onion bed, in rows a foot apart, and six inches between each plant. Nitrate and soot should be their portion as for the spring-sown onions, and in July they will give a fine harvest.

If the autumn-sown onions are a failure, as sometimes happens, it is worth the gardener’s while to sow a box of seed of Trebons or of a main crop variety in the hotbed in March, or earlier if possible. These plants will be put out in April, as advised above, and should give an abundant reward to the careful gardener.