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Mushrooms for

Mushrooms boiled with lemon juice, water, butter, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mushrooms for

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut away the gritty end of the stalk and pare the mushrooms.

  2. Place the mushrooms in a basin of cold water and wash them well.

  3. Lift the mushrooms out of the water with both hands to leave the sediment at the bottom.

Cook and store

  1. In a saucepan, combine the mushrooms, lemon juice, water, butter, salt, and pepper.

  2. Shake the saucepan constantly and let it boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Transfer to a jar, cover closely, and store.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Are the main substance, cooking down in their own moisture with the butter and water.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and helping give the mushrooms a silky texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the mushrooms pale.

The step that matters

Shake the saucepan constantly while boiling. Constant movement keeps the mushrooms from sticking and scorching on the bottom of the pan and helps them cook evenly in the liquid and butter.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Mangofits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, 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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