Name: Mushrooms to Serve with a Boiled Leg of Mutton
Ingredients: 1 pound fresh mushrooms (Agaricus campestris preferred); 2 tablespoons flour; 2 tablespoons butter or oil; Coarse sea salt to taste; Black pepper to taste; ½ pint good stock

Why it works: Mushroom and butter 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 ↓

Mushrooms to Serve with a Boiled Leg of Mutton

Ingredients

1 pound fresh mushrooms (Agaricus campestris preferred)
2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons butter or oil
Coarse sea salt to taste
Black pepper to taste
½ pint good stock

Directions

Prepare

Wash and dry the mushrooms.
Dip each mushroom in flour, avoiding excess on the gill side.

Cook

In a saucepan, heat the butter or oil over medium heat.
Place the mushrooms skin side down in the pan and season with salt and pepper.
Brown the mushrooms on this side, then quickly turn them to brown the gills.
Add the stock and let the mushrooms simmer gently for 15 minutes.

Serve

Remove the mushrooms with a skimmer and arrange them on a platter around the mutton.
Boil the sauce down to the desired consistency and pour it over the mushrooms 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.

Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,253 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50,459 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 absorb flavour from the stock and butter.
Flour: Coats the mushrooms so they brown well and help thicken the sauce.
Butter or oil: Conducts heat for browning and carries flavour across the mushroom surface.
Stock: Provides the liquid base for the sauce, adding savoury depth as it reduces.

The step that matters

Browning the mushrooms before adding stock. Browning the flour-coated surface develops savoury, roasted flavour through the Maillard reaction. Crowding the pan or moving them too early causes steaming, which leaves them pale and watery.

“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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Mushrooms to Serve with a Boiled Leg of Mutton