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Mushroom Cocktail

A chilled appetizer of button mushrooms topped with cocktail sauce, served on lettuce leaves with olives or pickled walnuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Mushroom Cocktail

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the plate

  1. Place a cup without a handle or a glass in the center of a plate.

  2. Encircle the cup with four or five white lettuce leaves.

  3. On each leaf, place two pimolas or olives, or pickled walnuts.

Make the cocktail sauce

  1. To make the cocktail sauce, mix the tomato ketchup, lemon juice, salt, and Tabasco sauce.

Assemble and serve

  1. In the glass, put six or eight button mushrooms.

  2. Cover the mushrooms well with cocktail sauce.

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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Olive + tomatotop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,539 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Lettuce + olivetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Lettuce + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,655 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Mushroom + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,571 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Button mushrooms
Form the main body of the cocktail and absorb the sauce's flavour.
Cocktail sauce
Adds moisture and tangy, sweet-savoury flavour that coats the mushrooms.
Tomato ketchup
Provides sweetness, acidity and body to the cocktail sauce.
Pimolas or olives or pickled walnuts
Add salty, tangy bites that contrast with the mild mushrooms.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, sauce, lettuce, olive, tomato, ketchup):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Lemonthe original
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, sauce, lettuce, olive, tomato, ketchup. 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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