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Mushrooms Au Gratin

A baked dish of mushrooms filled with a parsley, thyme, and biscuit crumb mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Mushrooms Au Gratin

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Select 10 mushrooms of similar size and peel them carefully without breaking.

  2. Cut out the stalks close to the cap and scoop out the inside.

  3. Peel the stalks and chop them with the scooped-out portion.

Make the filling

  1. Add the chopped stalks, onion, parsley, and thyme to a pan with a little butter and fry until softened.

  2. Mix in enough biscuit crumbs to form a moist paste and season with salt and pepper.

Bake and serve

  1. Fill the mushroom caps with the mixture and bake at 350°F (175°C) until the mushrooms are tender.

  2. Serve with fried parsley around the dish.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Almond + biscuittop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together388 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  5. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Form the edible cups that hold the filling and soften as they bake.
Butter
Fats the pan and carries flavour while the onion and stalks soften.
Biscuit crumbs
Absorb moisture and bind the chopped filling into a spreadable paste.
Eggs
Bind the filling and help it set when baked.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma as it softens in the butter.

The step that matters

Mixing in the biscuit crumbs. Crumbs must be added gradually until the paste is moist but not wet. Too little leaves the filling loose and runny, while too much makes it dry and stiff, so it will not hold together in the caps.

Swap the almond

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, onion, parsley, thyme, pepper, lemon, biscuit):

  1. Lentilsfits better
  2. Chestnutfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Almondthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, onion, parsley, thyme, pepper, lemon, biscuit. 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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