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Baked Mushrooms

Baked mushrooms topped with a butter, pepper, salt, lemon juice, and milk sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Baked Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

Bake and finish

  1. Place the mushrooms in a bake pan and add butter, pepper, salt, and lemon juice.

  2. Bake for 15 minutes.

  3. Remove the mushrooms and add milk to the pan.

  4. Thicken the mixture, then pour it over the mushrooms.

  5. Serve plain or on toast.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Form the bulk of the dish and release moisture that mingles with the butter and milk during baking.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor and helping the mushrooms brown lightly in the oven.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid that thickens into a sauce to coat the baked mushrooms.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mild, earthy flavor of the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture. Milk thickens only when heated gently and stirred, and it can scorch or curdle if it boils hard on the pan's base. Keep the heat moderate so the sauce becomes smooth before it is poured over the mushrooms.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Coconutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, pepper, milk. 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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