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Saute of Mushrooms

A sauté of mushrooms cooked with butter, flour, lemon juice, mushroom ketchup, and beef stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Saute of Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a chafing dish.

  2. Stir in the flour until smooth.

  3. Add salt, pepper, lemon juice, mushroom ketchup, and boiling water with dissolved fluid beef.

  4. Add the mushrooms and boil until tender.

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

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

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

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

  4. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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 soften into tender pieces as they cook.
Flour
Thickens the butter and liquid into a smooth, lightly bound sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour as the base for the sauce.
Fluid beef
Adds a savoury, meaty depth to the boiling liquid.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour until smooth. Flour clumps if added to hot fat without thorough stirring. Stirring it into the melted butter first coats each grain, so it can later thicken the liquid evenly instead of forming 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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