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Mushroom Forcemeat

A mushroom forcemeat made with sautéed mushrooms, hard‑boiled eggs, lemon juice, and butter, then sieved.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Mushroom Forcemeat

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and chop the mushrooms.

Cook and finish

  1. Fry the mushrooms in the butter.

  2. Add lemon juice to the mushrooms to preserve their color.

  3. Mix in the hard-boiled eggs.

  4. Rub the mixture through a wire sieve while hot.

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

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

  2. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Egg + lemontop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Egg and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 44,316 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
Provide the bulk, moisture and earthy flavour of the forcemeat.
Hard-boiled eggs
Set and bind the mixture, giving it body and a firmer texture.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour while the mushrooms fry and brown.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that slows browning, helping the mushrooms keep a pale color.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a wire sieve while hot. Warm mushrooms are soft and pass through the sieve smoothly. As they cool, they stiffen and resist, which makes a smooth texture harder to achieve.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, egg, butter):

  1. Coconutfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Bananafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, egg, 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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