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Mushrooms on Toast

A dish of sautéed mushrooms served on toast, accompanied by a celery sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Mushrooms on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Pick and clean the mushrooms.

  2. Fry the mushrooms in butter until they are quite black, seasoning with pepper and salt.

  3. Serve the mushrooms on neatly cut pieces of toast, stacking them and garnishing with parsley.

Make the celery topping

  1. Cut celery into three-inch pieces and parboil in milk.

  2. Add the parboiled celery to a sauce with lemon rind, nutmeg, Nepaul pepper, and salt.

  3. Lay the celery sauce on trimmed slices of toast and serve.

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 + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Main filling that browns in butter, giving the toast savory, concentrated flavor.
Butter
Fat that fries the mushrooms, carrying heat and encouraging browning on their surfaces.
Celery stalks
Provide the vegetable body of the topping after parboiling softens them in milk.
Milk
Softens the celery during parboiling and forms the base of the creamy sauce.
Slices of toast
Crisp base that holds the mushrooms and celery sauce.

The step that matters

Frying the mushrooms until quite black. Mushrooms release water first, then brown once it evaporates. Frying until deeply browned develops savory flavor, but too little heat or crowding will steam them grey and soggy.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, mushroom, pepper, parsley, celery, milk, lemon):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, mushroom, pepper, parsley, celery, milk, lemon. 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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