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Broiled Mushrooms

A dish of mushrooms broiled and served on toast with a butter‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,232 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Broiled Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Skin the mushrooms and remove the stems.

  2. Boil the stems just covered with water.

  3. Broil the mushrooms for three minutes.

Make the sauce

  1. In a frying pan, brown the butter and add the flour to thicken.

  2. Stir in the beef extract and the water from boiling the stems.

  3. Add the broiled mushrooms to the mixture and cook for about three minutes.

Serve

  1. Prepare round slices of toast and place a slice of broiled mushroom on each.

  2. Strain the juice over the mushrooms using a fine strainer.

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. Mushroom + beeftop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Mushroom + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish and release juices that flavour the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and browns to a nutty flavour when cooked in the pan.
Flour
Thickens the butter and stock mixture into a smooth sauce.
Beef extract
Adds concentrated savoury, meaty flavour to the sauce.
Bread
Provides a crisp base that soaks up the mushroom sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the butter and flour. Cooking the flour in the butter until lightly browned removes raw starch taste and builds color, and the flour must be stirred continuously so it thickens smoothly without lumps.

“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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