Skip to main content
Main

Grilled Mushrooms

Grilled mushrooms served with a creamy sauce made from broth, egg yolk, cream, parsley, and onion.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Grilled Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the mushrooms.

  2. Peel the mushrooms.

  3. Score the tops with a knife.

  4. Marinate the mushrooms in oil, salt, pepper, and lemon juice for 1 hour.

Grill and make the sauce

  1. Place the mushroom tops down on a grill.

  2. Broil over a clear, slow fire.

  3. Chop the stalks and broken pieces of mushrooms.

  4. Stew the chopped pieces in broth for 10 minutes with parsley and onion.

  5. Beat the egg yolk with cream.

  6. Slowly add the beaten mixture to the sauce.

  7. Stir the sauce until hot without boiling.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the toast.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Large mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish, shrinking and softening as they grill.
Oil
Carries the seasoning and helps the mushroom surfaces brown on the grill.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mushrooms and loosens their flavour during marinating.
Egg yolk
Thickens the sauce gently and gives it a smooth, rich texture.
Cream
Adds fat and body, making the sauce smooth and rich.
Broth
Provides savoury liquid in which the chopped mushroom pieces are stewed.

The step that matters

Stir the sauce until hot without boiling. Egg yolk thickens through gentle heat; if the sauce boils, the yolk can scramble and curdle, leaving a grainy texture instead of a smooth sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, pepper, lemon, parsley, egg, cream):

  1. Spinachfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, pepper, lemon, parsley, egg, cream. 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.

You might also like