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Grilled Mushrooms

Mushrooms grilled and served with a sauce of broth, parsley, onions, butter, lemon juice, egg, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Grilled Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Skin the mushrooms and remove the stalks.

  2. Place the mushrooms on a dish with fine oil, pepper, and coarse sea salt.

  3. Let them marinate for 1 hour.

Grill and make the sauce

  1. Broil the mushrooms on a grill over a clear, sharp fire.

  2. For the sauce, mince the stalks and any spare mushroom pieces.

  3. In a saucepan, combine the minced mushrooms with broth, chopped parsley, young onions, butter, and lemon juice or the egg beaten with cream. Mix thoroughly.

  4. Pour the sauce around the grilled mushrooms.

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

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

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

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

  5. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Large fresh mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and juicy when grilled.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the sauce, carrying flavour and helping it feel smooth.
Egg
Thickens the sauce gently with cream when heated, giving it a creamy body.
Cream
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smoother, softer texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mushrooms and balances the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Combining the egg and cream into the sauce. Egg proteins thicken when heated gently, but if the sauce gets too hot the egg can scramble and turn grainy. Keep heat low and stir steadily.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, pepper, parsley, butter, lemon, egg, cream. 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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