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Cooking the Mushrooms

A simple dish of sautéed mushrooms cooked in butter and oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cooking the Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat 1 oz of butter and 2 tablespoons of oil in a saucepan until it begins to smoke lightly.

  2. Add the mushrooms and cook on the open fire until they acquire a light brown color.

  3. Remove the saucepan to the side of the stove to keep the contents hot.

  4. Just before serving, reset the saucepan on the open fire and sauté the mushrooms again.

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. 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
Browning in hot fat concentrates their flavor and gives them a golden, savory color.
Butter
Adds richness and a nutty aroma as it heats in the pan with the oil.
Oil
Raises the cooking temperature of the fat so the mushrooms brown rather than steam.

The step that matters

Cooking the mushrooms until light brown. Mushrooms release water as they cook. If the pan is crowded or not hot enough, they steam instead of browning, leaving them pale and soft. Browning needs high heat and enough space for moisture to evaporate.

“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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