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LYCOPERDACE^l, or Puff-balls

Fried slices of puffball mushrooms in seasoned batter or butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Egg and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

LYCOPERDACE^l, or Puff-balls

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Make a seasoned batter as you would for frying eggplant, or beat eggs for the same purpose.

  2. Cut the puff-balls into slices that are ½ inch thick.

Cook

  1. Fry the slices in boiling fat or on a buttered griddle until golden brown.

  2. Alternatively, stew puff-balls with Coprinus or ordinary mushrooms to enhance flavor.

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. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Puff-balls
Form the main body of the dish, with a mild flavor that takes on the coating and cooking fat.
Eggs
Bind and set around the slices, helping the coating hold together and turn golden when fried.
Seasoned batter
Forms a crisp coating that browns in hot fat and seals in moisture from the slices.

The step that matters

Frying in boiling fat or on a buttered griddle. The fat must be hot enough to brown the batter quickly. If it is too cool, the coating absorbs oil and turns greasy before it crisps, and the slices can steam instead of browning.

“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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