Name: Swedish Timbales with Musheooms
Ingredients: 1 cup mushrooms, chopped; 4 tablespoons butter; ½ teaspoon salt; 2 cups boiling water; ¼ teaspoon pepper; 5 tablespoons flour

Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Swedish Timbales with Musheooms

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mushroom sauce

Sauté the mushrooms in 4 tablespoons of butter until tender.
In a separate pot, make a white sauce by combining 4 tablespoons of butter, 5 tablespoons of flour, and 2 cups of boiling water.
Add the sautéed mushrooms to the white sauce.
Season with salt and pepper.

Serve

Serve in timbale cases.

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.

Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,253 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50,459 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour 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

Flour: Thickens the butter and water into a white sauce that holds the mushrooms.
Butter: Carries the flavour for sautéing the mushrooms and enriches the white sauce.
Mushrooms: Provide the main savoury flavour and body of the filling.

The step that matters

Making the white sauce. Flour must be fully combined with the melted butter and then whisked into the boiling water so it does not form lumps. Cooking it through lets the starch swell and thicken the sauce smoothly.

“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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Swedish Timbales with Musheooms