Name: Baked Mushrooms
Ingredients: large flat mushrooms, cleaned and trimmed; thin slices of buttered toast; butter; black pepper; coarse sea salt

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 ↓

Baked Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Preheat your oven to 400°F (200°C).

Assemble and bake

Place the cleaned mushrooms on the buttered toast slices.
Add a small piece of butter and a pinch of black pepper and coarse sea salt to each mushroom.
Arrange them on a baking tray and cover carefully.
Bake in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes.

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.

Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Large flat mushrooms: Hold their moisture and soften as they bake, becoming tender and savory.
Butter: Adds fat that carries flavor and helps the mushrooms brown lightly in the oven.
Buttered toast: Provides a crisp, absorbent base that soaks up juices from the mushrooms.

“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.