Since childhood, I’ve been afraid of quiche. I remember vividly, as one does of otherwise random moments from youth, an early experience with this odd breakfast-style casserole. At some point when I was a young pup, my mother made some of it for dinner and I took one bite, refusing to go on. Something about the texture or taste, the abuse of breakfast’s ingredients in a dinnertime setting turned me off and I put my fork right down.
“I don’t like this, Mom!”
“Yes you do, sweetie. You like everything in there: eggs, milk, cheese. You can eat around the green peppers. They’re all things you eat. So you have to like this.”
Stunned, I scrambled to decide whether the wool was being pulled over my eyes, or if this--what I would later realize as my first introduction to food science, chemistry, and even the poetry of food-making--made perfect sense.
What I mean is that a casserole, most foods really, is not simply a sum of its ingredients. High school chemistry taught us the difference between physical changes (water to gas) and chemical changes (wood to ash). As much as I like fruitarians and/or the food movement which thinks creating pasta out of raw julienned vegetables is a good idea, there is, as Adam Gopnik notes in Paris to the Moon, a sublime, even tragic moment in cooking, “when nature becomes culture, stuff becomes things...the colors begin to change, and the smells gather together just at the level of your nose. Everything begins to mottle, bend from raw to cooked. The chestnuts, if you’re doing chestnuts, turn a little damp, a little weepy. That’s what they do: everything weeps.”
And so it has been, each time the Christmas quiche comes out, I’ve felt by turns scared, curious, and nostalgic. I have, of course, had a few quiches here and there since then, however I have never cooked one. When I began browsing at Simply Recipes and saw something using nutmeg and mushrooms, and, if I used frozen pie crust, would only require buying a hunk of Gruyère cheese and some mushrooms, I decided it was time to embark. While making a real homemade crust would have been infinitely better and not really too hard, focusing on the part of the quiche that scared me in the first place was the way to go. It turned out fantastic--very simple, hearty, creamy, subtle. The nutmeg is a wonderful touch and Gruyère cheese--something halfway between your soft and hard varieties, with a nice crystallized saltiness like Parmesan with a creamier, gentler palette--pairs well with it. With a frozen pie crust, this meal is prepped and in the oven in about 20 minutes, and when you’re done you just toss the tin foil pie pan right in the trash.
-Blake
Mushroom Quiche with Nutmeg and Gruyère Cheese
1 frozen pie crust
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 medium shallots, thinly sliced
1/2 pound assorted mushrooms, quartered
Salt and freshly ground pepper
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup heavy cream
3 large eggs
Pinch nutmeg
3 ounces Gruyère cheese, grated (3/4 cup)
Adapted from Simply Recipes.
Simple instructions here.
First, pull your crust out of the freezer--it will take about 15 minutes to defrost--so it’s ready for you when you need it, and turn the oven to 375 degrees. Cut up your mushrooms into manageable chunks. By the way, I made enough for two pies, so estimate about half this many mushrooms. I used regular white, which I quartered, and a handful of the smaller, criminy breed, which I halved. Just so they’re bite-sized or smaller, and basically uniform.
Heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium-high, and cook them for a minute, until they begin to weep.
Dump the mushrooms into the skillet and stir the pan. Season with salt and pepper at this point, so it will cook into the mushrooms themselves. Watch the shallots, and if they begin to brown add a bit of olive oil to buffer them. Be careful to not add too much--while the mushrooms will look like they’re not cooperating, as they heat through they will begin to release their moisture and provide cooking liquid for you.
In about five minutes it will look like this, and then all of a sudden the cooking liquid will begin evaporating. Keep them going until all the liquid has evaporated and the mushrooms are a golden brown, about ten minutes total.
In the meantime, line the bottom of the crust with about half the cheese. In a bowl whisk the eggs, milk, cream, nutmeg, salt and pepper. When the mushrooms are done, remove them from the heat and dump them into the crust. Top with the remaining cheese, then our the egg mixture over it. Slide it into the oven and bake 30-35 minutes, or until the top is a golden brown and a fork placed into the center comes out clean. Let it rest for ten minutes, then serve.
