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Mushrooms to Serve with a Boiled Leg of Mutton

Mushrooms sautéed with butter, flour, and stock, served as a side for a boiled leg of mutton.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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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

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Wash the mushrooms and dry them.

  2. Dip each mushroom in flour, avoiding excess on the gill side.

Cook the mushrooms

  1. In a saucepan, heat the butter or oil.

  2. Place the mushrooms skin side down in the pan. Dust lightly with salt and pepper.

  3. Brown the mushrooms on this side, then turn and brown the gills.

  4. Add the stock and let simmer gently for 15 minutes.

Serve

  1. Remove the mushrooms with a skimmer and arrange on a platter around the mutton.

  2. Boil the sauce down to the proper consistency and pour 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.

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

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

  2. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. 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
Main ingredient; browning in butter or oil gives them savory flavor and a golden surface.
Flour
Light coating on the mushrooms that helps them brown and thickens the pan sauce.
Butter or oil
Cooking fat that conducts heat to the mushrooms and carries browning flavor.
Good stock
Liquid that simmers with the mushrooms and reduces into the sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the mushrooms. Mushrooms release moisture as they cook; they need enough heat and room in the pan to brown rather than steam. Browning builds the flavor the sauce depends on.

“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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