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Grilled Mushrooms

Mushrooms grilled with butter, lemon, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Grilled Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Choose large mushrooms and peel them.

  2. Rinse the mushrooms in salted water and dry them well.

  3. Melt butter and pour it over the mushrooms. Season with pepper and salt, and let them marinate for 30 minutes or longer.

Grill and serve

  1. Grease the bars of a gridiron and lay the mushrooms white side down.

  2. Broil the mushrooms over a clear fire for 8 to 10 minutes, turning them once during cooking.

  3. Squeeze a few drops of lemon juice on each mushroom, arrange them on a hot dish, and serve immediately.

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

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

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

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

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 soften and brown over the fire.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the mushrooms brown and carry seasoning.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, savoury flavour of the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Broil the mushrooms over a clear fire for 8 to 10 minutes, turning them once. Mushrooms release moisture as they cook, and high direct heat drives that off so they brown instead of steaming. Turning once lets both sides brown evenly, while leaving them too long can dry and toughen them.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, 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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