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French Toast with Mushrooms

A toasted bread dish topped with sautéed mushrooms in a butter and nutmeg sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and wheat are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,418 recipes. Both carry (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal, which smells cucumber, melon. The science ↓

French Toast with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the toast

  1. Dip slices of bread quickly in sweet milk on both sides.

  2. Dip the bread in beaten eggs.

  3. Fry the bread in a little butter until golden.

Make the mushroom sauce

  1. Heat the liquid from the can of mushrooms in a pan.

  2. Add 2 teaspoons of butter and a small amount of grated nutmeg.

  3. Chop the mushrooms and add them to the pan.

  4. Pour the mushroom mixture over the toast and serve.

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. Milk + wheattop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  2. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  5. Nutmeg + wheattop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together359 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Bread
Forms the base that soaks up the milk and egg and browns in the butter.
Eggs
Bind the custard coating and set on frying to give the toast a firm, golden crust.
Sweet milk
Moistens the bread so the interior becomes soft while the outside fries.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavor and body to the sauce made from their canning liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the toast brown evenly in the pan.

The step that matters

Dip the bread quickly in milk. Bread that soaks too long turns soggy and falls apart in the pan, so a quick dip on both sides keeps the slices intact before the egg coating and frying.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, milk, egg, butter, mushroom, wheat):

  1. Nutmegthe original
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits less well
  4. Thymefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, milk, egg, butter, mushroom, wheat. 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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