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Tenderloin with Mushrooms

Tenderloin sliced and browned, finished with a mushroom sauce made from canned button mushrooms and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,232 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Tenderloin with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a skillet, brown the tenderloin in butter for 20 to 25 minutes.

  2. Transfer the browned tenderloin to a warm dish.

  3. In the same pan, add flour and let it brown slightly, then add the canned mushrooms with their juice and cook for a few minutes.

  4. Pour the mushroom mixture over the steak before serving.

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. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Beef + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,847 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Flour + mushroomtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 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

Tenderloin
Forms the main body of the dish, cooking through and browning in the butter.
Butter
Conducts heat for browning the meat and adds richness and flavor.
Flour
Browns in the pan fat and thickens the mushroom juices into a light sauce.
Canned button mushrooms
Add savory flavor and moisture, and their juice loosens the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Letting the flour toast lightly in the pan fat builds a nutty, deeper flavor and helps it thicken smoothly once the liquid goes in. Stop before it darkens too far, or it turns bitter.

“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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