Melt a great spoonful of butter in an agate frying-pan. Peel the mushrooms and cut off their stems, scraping the latter. Lay the mushrooms with their scraped stalks in the frying-pan and cook, turning often, until done. Serve very hot.
Stewed mushrooms
Peel the mushrooms and simmer gently in salted water until tender. Ten minutes should suffice. Drain and keep hot while you make a white sauce of a half pint of milk thickened with a tablespoonful of flour rubbed into one of butter. Turn the mushrooms into this and stir over the fire until very hot. Season with salt, pepper, a dash of mace, and serve.
Baked mushrooms
Peel very large mushrooms and cut off their stems. Grease a shallow pudding-dish and put a layer of mushrooms, under sides upward, into this. Into each mushroom pour a few drops of melted butter. Do not put more than two layers in the dish. Bake, closely covered, in a quick oven until tender. This should be in about twenty minutes. When done, remove the cover, pour melted butter over the mushrooms, and serve very hot in the dish in which they were cooked.
Fricasseed mushrooms
Peel and remove the stems from large mushrooms. Make a forcemeat by chopping the white meat of a cold roast chicken fine with a few small mushrooms and moistening it with chicken stock. Grease a pudding-dish and lay the large mushrooms, tops down, in this. Fill the mushrooms and the space between them with the forcemeat. Sprinkle bits of butter over all. Pour in enough of the chicken stock to make the contents of the dish very moist, lay a few wafer-like slices of bacon on top of the scallop, and bake, covered, in a hot oven for a quarter of an hour. Uncover, and cook for five minutes longer. Serve in the dish in which they were cooked.
ONIONS
A once-despised vegetable which now takes rank as a highly-respectable edible upon good men’s—and women’s—tables. Delicate spinsters no longer faint at fumes of boiled onions, and finical housewives have forgotten the rusty joke about cooking onions in the middle of a ten-acre lot. There are ways of extracting the coarser flavor that once condemned them with dyspeptics. Cooks have learned that there is as much difference between a well-done and a parboiled onion as between half-cooked and mealy potatoes. Housewives and physicians now appreciate the nutritive values of the esculent bulb, and prize it for these as well as for the seasoning which nothing else supplies. Onion juice is indispensable to the flavor of ragouts and soups, and is obtained by grating, not chopping. The superiority of this mode of getting the essence of the vegetable can not be rightly estimated by one who has not tried it. Onion seasoning should be tasted, never seen.