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Mushrooms, on Toast

Mushrooms sautéed with butter, flour, stock, lemon, and parsley served hot over fried bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon 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 ↓

Mushrooms, on Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Cut large mushrooms in half and skin them.

  2. Blanch the mushrooms in hot water, then cool them in cold water and wipe dry.

Cook the mushrooms

  1. Melt 2 oz of butter in a saucepan and add the mushrooms.

  2. Sprinkle in a pinch of flour, then add salt, pepper, and parsley.

  3. Add a little stock and cook the mushrooms for 15 minutes.

  4. Add the juice of 1 lemon.

Fry the bread and serve

  1. Fry the bread slices in 2 oz of melted butter on both sides.

  2. Place the fried bread on a dish.

  3. Remove the parsley from the mushrooms and pour the mushrooms with their sauce over the bread.

  4. Serve very hot.

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. Parsley + lemontop 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Mushroom + buttertop 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
Form the main body of the dish and release moisture that becomes the sauce.
Butter
Carries flavour and fat, and browns the bread when frying.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce around the mushrooms.
Stock
Adds savoury liquid that cooks the mushrooms and forms the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the buttery mushrooms and sauce.
Bread
Provides a crisp, golden base that soaks up the mushroom sauce.

The step that matters

Blanch the mushrooms, then dry them well. Blanching briefly heats the mushrooms and cooling stops further softening. Wiping them dry matters because surface water would dilute the butter and flour, weakening the sauce and stopping the mushrooms from browning and absorbing flavour.

“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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