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Blanched Mushrooms

Blanched mushrooms are cooked briefly in salted water, then the stalks are chopped and simmered with mushroom liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Blanched Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the stalks from the mushrooms and reserve them for chopping.

  2. Wash the mushroom heads in clean water and drain them.

Blanch the mushrooms

  1. In a stewpan, combine cold water and salt.

  2. Peel each mushroom head and add them to the stewpan immediately to prevent discoloration.

  3. Bring to a boil over high heat and cook for 5 minutes.

  4. Transfer the mushrooms to a basin for later use.

Make the stalk liquid

  1. Chop the reserved stalks finely and add them to the stewpan with the mushroom cooking liquid.

  2. Simmer for 3 minutes, then transfer to a jar for use later.

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. Pepper + lemontop 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. Butter + lemontop 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
The main ingredient, providing the body and flavour of the dish.

The step that matters

Peel and add the mushrooms to the water immediately. Cut and peeled mushroom surfaces darken quickly as enzymes react with air. Getting them into the water right away slows this discoloration and keeps the mushrooms pale.

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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