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Mushrooms

Mushrooms stuffed with a mixture of meat, tomatoes, shallot, flour, and Worcestershire sauce, baked until cooked.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and shallot are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,982 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Mushrooms

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the filling

  1. Preheat the oven to 300°F (150°C).

  2. In a bowl, combine the chopped meat, shallot, flour, Worcestershire sauce, tomatoes, and mushrooms.

  3. Season the mixture with salt.

  4. Blend the mixture with 2 tablespoons of stock or gravy.

Stuff and bake

  1. Stuff the mixture into the mushrooms.

  2. Place the stuffed mushrooms in a well-buttered paper bag.

  3. Bake for 35 to 50 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Mushroom + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Shallot + flourtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mushroom + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Hold the filling and release moisture as they cook, forming the base of each bite.
Cold meat or poultry
Provides the savory, meaty body of the filling.
Flour
Thickens the filling so it holds together rather than running out of the mushrooms.
Shallot or onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth as it softens into the filling.
Tomatoes
Add moisture and gentle acidity to the filling.

The step that matters

Blending the filling with stock or gravy. The flour and cooked meat need enough liquid to bind into a moist, spoonable mixture. Too little liquid leaves the filling dry and crumbly, while too much makes it loose and likely to spill out during baking.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, sauce, shallot, flour, meat, butter):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Welsh onionfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, sauce, shallot, flour, meat, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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