Name: Mushrooms on Toast
Ingredients: 1 quart mushrooms, peeled and trimmed; 1 ounce butter; ½ pound raw minced steak; ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 1 pinch cayenne pepper; ½ cup hot water; Additional butter (if needed); Hot toast

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 ↓

Mushrooms on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the meat

Melt the butter in a frying pan over medium heat.
Fry the minced steak in the butter, adding salt and cayenne pepper.
Pour in the hot water and cook until the juices are extracted from the meat.
Press the meat with the back of a spoon until only dry meat remains, then remove it from the pan.

Cook the mushrooms and serve

Add the mushrooms to the liquid in the pan, adding more butter if necessary.
Toss the mushrooms for a moment, then pour over hot 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.

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

Mushrooms: Make up the main bulk of the dish and soften in the pan liquid, releasing their own moisture and flavour.
Minced steak: Browns in the butter and gives up its juices to build a savoury, meaty liquid for the mushrooms.
Butter: Carries the heat and adds richness, helping the meat brown and the mushrooms take on flavour.

The step that matters

Pressing the meat until only dry meat remains. If the meat is left wet, it steams rather than browning, and the juices needed for the sauce are lost. Pressing it after the juices are drawn out helps the meat brown and concentrates the flavour in the pan liquid.

“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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Mushrooms on Toast