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Mushrooms Au Gratin

Mushrooms filled with a buttery, breadcrumb mixture, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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. Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C).

  2. Peel the mushrooms carefully and remove the stalks.

  3. Scoop out the inside of each mushroom cup to make it hollow.

  4. Chop the stalks and the scooped-out mushroom parts with the onion.

Make the filling

  1. Fry the mixture in a little butter until fragrant.

  2. Add enough dried bread crumbs to form a moist paste.

  3. Fill each mushroom cup with the mixture, making the top convex.

Bake and serve

  1. Bake in the oven until golden and serve 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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Mushroom + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

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

  3. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Form the hollow cups that hold the filling and provide the main body of the dish.
Onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and savoury depth to the filling as it softens in butter.
Dried bread crumbs
Absorb moisture from the chopped mixture, binding it into a paste and helping it brown.
Butter
Fat that carries the aromas of the onion and herbs and helps the filling brown.

The step that matters

Make the filling a moist paste. Bread crumbs must be added gradually until the mixture just holds together. Too few leaves a dry, crumbly filling, while too many makes it stodgy and pasty once baked.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, parsley, thyme, butter, bread. 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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