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Mushroom Toast

A toasted bread topped with sautéed mushrooms in a butter, flour, and beef broth sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and beef 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 ↓

Mushroom Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the mushrooms roughly.

  2. Heat the butter in a chafing dish.

Cook the mushrooms

  1. Add the flour and mushrooms, and sauté for 5 minutes.

  2. Add the water and fluid beef, and cook for 10 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve the mixture on the buttered 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. Mushroom + beeftop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

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

Mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish and release moisture that becomes part of the sauce as they cook.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the mushrooms brown as they sauté.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce that clings to the mushrooms.
Fluid beef
Adds savoury, meaty flavour to the mushroom sauce.

The step that matters

Sautéing the mushrooms with flour. Mushrooms hold a lot of water. If they are crowded or cooked too gently, they steam instead of browning, and the flour may clump rather than thicken the liquid smoothly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, flour, beef, pepper. 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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