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Poached Eggs with Mushrooms

Poached eggs served with a mushroom sauce, garnished with parsley and watercress, accompanied by toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley 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 ↓

Poached Eggs with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mushroom sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the mushrooms, salt, cayenne pepper, and lemon juice.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes, then remove the mushrooms and thicken the sauce with a little flour.

Plate and serve

  1. Pour the sauce onto a platter.

  2. Arrange the poached eggs around the outside of the sauce and place the mushrooms in the center.

  3. Serve hot with toast, garnished with parsley and watercress.

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. Lemon + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Parsley + watercresstop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together469 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Lemon + watercresstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the mushroom sauce so it coats the eggs and toast.
Eggs
Provide the main protein and a rich, creamy yolk that sits over the sauce.
Mushrooms
Supply savoury flavour and body to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds brightness that balances the richness of the mushrooms and eggs.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce with flour. Flour must be stirred in so it dissolves without lumps; it thickens as the starch swells when heated, and adding it to a boiling liquid without mixing it well first can leave clumps.

“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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