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Broiled Mushrooms

Broiled mushrooms served on toast, seasoned with sherry, lemon juice, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Broiled Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and stem the flat mushrooms.

  2. Roll the mushrooms in melted butter.

Broil and serve

  1. Broil the mushrooms quickly.

  2. Wet each slice of toast with the sherry and lemon juice mixture.

  3. Place the hot mushrooms on the toast.

  4. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  5. Let the mushrooms and toast cool completely before serving.

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 + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + sherrytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,176 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

  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. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Flat mushrooms
Provide the main body and savoury flavour, and release juices that moisten the toast.
Melted butter
Adds fat that carries flavour and helps the mushroom surfaces brown under the broiler.
Thin slices of toast
Form a crisp base that soaks up the mushroom juices and sherry mixture.
Sherry
Adds aromatic, slightly sweet flavour to the toast.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and mushroom flavours.

The step that matters

Broil the mushrooms quickly. High, fast heat browns the surface and drives off moisture before the mushrooms release too much liquid. Slow cooking would steam them, leaving them soggy and pale.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Plumfits better
  2. Pineapplefits about as well
  3. Grapefits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

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