Name: Broiled Mushrooms
Ingredients: 1 tablespoon butter; 1 quart mushrooms; coarse sea salt to taste; additional butter for serving; toast for serving

Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Broiled Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Melt the butter in a skillet over medium heat.
Add the mushrooms and cook for about 10 minutes, turning often, until tender.
Season with coarse sea salt and add a little more butter.
Serve hot 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.

Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms: Form the main body of the dish and release moisture that concentrates as they cook.
Butter: Adds fat for gentle browning and a rich, savoury flavour to the mushrooms.

“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.