Name: Fried Mushrooms
Ingredients: 2 lb young mushrooms; 10 ½ tablespoons butter; pepper to taste; coarse sea salt to taste

Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Fried Mushrooms

Ingredients

2 lb young mushrooms
10 ½ tablespoons butter
pepper to taste
coarse sea salt to taste

Directions

Prepare

Peel the mushrooms and remove the stalks.
Melt half the butter in a frying pan.

Cook

Add the mushrooms and dust with pepper and a little salt.
As they cook, transfer them to a hot dish and keep warm in the oven.
Repeat with the remaining mushrooms, adding more butter, pepper, and salt.

Serve

Pour the collected juices from the pan over the mushrooms and serve 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.

Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Young mushrooms: Form the main body of the dish, cooking down to a tender texture in the butter.
Butter: Carries the heat and browns the mushrooms while adding richness and 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.