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Mushrooms Au Gratin

Mushrooms filled with ham, parsley, and custard, baked with breadcrumbs and served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Mushrooms Au Gratin

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

The book says “a hot oven”. The 400°F in the steps is the modern equivalent, not the book's own figure.

Prepare the filling

  1. Cut the stalks and trim the edges of the mushrooms.

  2. Chop the ham and parsley finely.

  3. In a saucepan, combine ham, parsley, butter, flour, seasoning, and thyme; heat until hot.

  4. Stir in the eggs until the mixture forms a thick custard.

Fill and bake

  1. Fill the mushrooms with the custard mixture.

  2. Place the filled mushrooms in a shallow pan with butter and a little gravy.

  3. Cover with breadcrumbs and bake in a hot oven (400°F / 200°C) for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve in a heap on a hot dish and pour boiling well-seasoned gravy around them.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Mushroom + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  5. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Act as the edible cups that hold the custard filling while baking.
Eggs
Set the ham and herb mixture into a thick custard when heated.
Ham
Adds savoury, salty flavour to the custard filling.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the mushrooms brown in the pan.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned topping over the filled mushrooms in the oven.
Flour
Thickens the butter and ham mixture so it holds together before the eggs are added.

The step that matters

Stir in the eggs until the mixture forms a thick custard.. Eggs set when heated, so the mixture thickens into a custard. Adding them to a mixture that is too hot can scramble them, leaving lumps instead of a smooth filling.

Swap the thyme

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, ham, parsley, butter, flour, egg, bread):

  1. Capersfits about as well
  2. Thymethe original
  3. Nutmegfits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, ham, parsley, butter, flour, egg, bread. 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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