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Croustades of Mushrooms

Croustades of Mushrooms are pastry shells filled with a sautéed onion and mushroom mixture flavored with anchovy, mustard, and brown sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,259 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Croustades of Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Fry the chopped onion in butter until pale brown.

  2. Add the finely chopped mushrooms and simmer until they are two-thirds cooked.

  3. Pound the soaked anchovies with the mustard and brown sauce in a mortar.

  4. Add the anchovy mixture to the mushrooms and boil for 2-3 minutes.

Serve

  1. Fill your croustade cases with the mushroom mixture.

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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

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

  4. Mustard + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,120 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Provide the bulk of the filling and release moisture that must cook off.
Butter
Carries the onion and adds rich flavour as it browns.
Anchovies
Add a salty, savoury depth that rounds out the filling.
Brown sauce
Adds colour, savoury richness and a deep flavour base.
French mustard
Adds sharpness that balances the richness of the butter and sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer the mushrooms to two-thirds cooked. Mushrooms hold a lot of water. Cooking them until partly done drives off moisture so the filling stays thick and does not make the croustade cases soggy.

Swap the mustard

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, butter, mushroom, sauce. 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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