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Champignons Aux Fines Herbes

Sautéed mushrooms seasoned with olive oil, salt, pepper, lemon juice, and fresh herbs, served on toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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 ↓

Champignons Aux Fines Herbes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select and peel the mushrooms, wash and drain them.

  2. Season the mushrooms with olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  3. Let them sit for 1 hour.

Cook and serve

  1. Broil the mushrooms in a sauté pan with butter or grill them over the fire until done.

  2. Serve the mushrooms on pieces of toasted bread.

  3. Prepare a sauce with oiled butter, chopped parsley, and chives.

  4. Pour the sauce over the mushrooms 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. 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. Parsley + chivetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  5. Olive + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,649 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 browns during cooking.
Olive oil
Carries seasoning and helps the mushrooms brown when cooked with heat.
Butter
Adds richness and encourages browning in the pan.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Broil the mushrooms until done. Mushrooms are mostly water. If they are crowded or the heat is too low, they steam instead of browning, so they turn grey and rubbery rather than savoury and golden.

Swap the chive

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Capsicumfits better
  4. Chivethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, olive, pepper, lemon, butter, bread, parsley. 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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