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Mushroom Sautes

Sautéed mushrooms with butter, lemon, and parsley served on toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Mushroom Sautes

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the mushrooms, remove the stems, peel the caps, and break them into pieces.

  2. In a skillet, melt the butter and add the mushrooms with salt and pepper.

  3. Cover and cook for 10 minutes, tossing occasionally.

  4. Add the lemon juice and parsley, then serve on hot slices of toast.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  5. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish and release moisture as they cook.
Butter
Carries heat into the mushrooms and adds richness and browning flavor.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the earthy flavor of the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Cover and cook for 10 minutes, tossing occasionally. Covering traps steam that draws out the mushrooms' moisture, so they cook through softly. Removing the lid and tossing lets that liquid evaporate so the mushrooms can brown instead of stewing.

“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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