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Fillets of Beef with Mushrooms

Beef fillets sautéed with mushrooms in a butter‑flour sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fillets of Beef with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the steak

  1. Trim the steak slices to the shape of mutton cutlets.

  2. Melt butter in a baking tin and place the fillets in it.

  3. Let them stand in a warm place for 1-2 hours.

  4. Fry the fillets in very hot butter or dripping, turning to color both sides.

Make the sauce

  1. In a separate pan, melt 1 tablespoon of butter and mix with 1 tablespoon of flour.

  2. Moisten the mixture with good stock and add food coloring if desired.

  3. Add the mushrooms and cook until done.

  4. Stir in the juice of ½ lemon.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the fillets, heap the mushrooms in the center, and arrange the fillets around in a crown shape.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

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

Butter and flour 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

Rump steak
Provides the meat that is seared and served as the fillets.
Butter
Fat for frying the fillets and forming the roux base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a smooth sauce.
Button mushrooms
Add earthy flavor and moisture to the sauce and serve as the centerpiece.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Fry the fillets in very hot butter or dripping. Very hot fat sears the surface quickly, creating browning and flavor on both sides, while a cooler pan would steam the meat and leave it grey and tough.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, mushroom, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mushroom, pepper. 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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