Vintage Cooking Adventures: Stuffed Mushrooms and Cheese Straws

A few posts ago, I suggested the idea of writing about my vintage cooking escapades. My lovely readers were kind enough to show interest, so here we are to talk about my recent vintage cooking adventures.

The first recipe I tried was for stuffed mushrooms. (Both recipes featured in this post were taken from the 1955 Good Housekeeping Cook Book which I also mentioned in my previous post.)

It’s a fairly straightforward recipe, as you see. (Which is not an insignificant part of why I chose it.) I had never removed mushroom stems before, so I performed that task rather clumsily…I could show you a picture of what my poor mushroom caps looked like, but there’s really no need for you to see that. I also probably did not chop the celery and onion as finely as I was supposed to…they were about this size.

But I didn’t want to spend the rest of my natural life chopping celery, so there you are.

I then simmered the celery and onion and mushroom stems as directed, and added the seasoning. We don’t usually have Worcestershire sauce on hand, so I used soy sauce instead. I did literally use a brush to brush the caps with melted butter, which was very messy and annoying; I made this recipe again a week or so later, and that time I just dipped the flat part of the mushroom cap into a bowl of melted butter – which had the same effect, but was so much easier to do.

Here are my mushrooms, all stuffed and starting to cook. I know they aren’t pretty, but oh well. Such is Life.

I cooked the mushrooms for significantly longer than the recipe directs, since we like our mushrooms pretty soft around here.

And voila, the final result!

Still not very pretty (neither are my fatty pieces of chicken in the background…sorry about that), but other than that they were a smashing success! People liked them quite a bit, and my mom even requested that I make them again. I personally felt that the stuffing was a bit too salty, so when I tried the recipe a second time I cut back on the salt.

The second vintage recipe I tried was for cheese straws. I don’t know if cheese straws are much of a Thing anymore…I don’t recall ever seeing them in the present day, but you hear of them in older books and things. I seem to remember Bertie Wooster having an awkward dinner conversation with Madeline Bassett while she nibbled on cheese straws.

I only made a half-batch, since I expected I would be the only one eating these. I used the generic Walmart-brand gluten-free flour, which I know from sad and hard experience is not exactly the best flour mix in the world…but I didn’t think it could do too much damage in this application.

It wasn’t long before I gave up on making the grate for the cheese particularly fine, since grating American cheese on our grater did not work very well and was not very fun. I cannot recommend the experience. If I do this recipe again, I’ll either chop the cheese or use a pre-grated cheese.

I don’t have anything which properly qualifies as shortening, so I used our naturally refined coconut oil instead (which has no taste; I don’t think a coconut flavor would work very well in this particular context). Perhaps it was due to this change that I needed to add significantly more milk than the recipe called for to make it anything like a dough consistency.

In any case, I got ’em all rolled out in the end.

And I promptly forgot to sprinkle on the paprika. But I remembered just after I put them in the oven, so it wasn’t too hard to remedy my shocking error.

Voila the finished product!

And these, too, were a smashing success. The cheese taste was very mild…they were like bread sticks with a hint of cheese flavor. But goodness, were they addictive. I made these right before lunchtime, and an embarrassingly large amount of them had somehow or other disappeared by the end of lunchtime.

So on the whole, I’m rather pleased with this session of vintage cooking! I keep finding intriguing new vintage recipes (there’s one for chicken soufflé and one for a very simple lemon meringue that have captured my attention currently) so I expect my vintage cooking escapades will not be ending anytime soon.

Do either of these recipes appeal to you? Any interesting/funny cooking stories? Any vintage recipes to share?