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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 mushrooms in hot water, then cool in cold water and wipe dry.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt 2 ounces of butter in a stewpan.

  2. Add the mushrooms and sprinkle in a pinch of flour.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, then add the parsley.

  4. Pour in a little stock and cook the mushrooms for 15 minutes.

  5. Add the juice of 1 lemon.

Fry the bread and serve

  1. Melt 2 ounces of butter and fry the bread on both sides until golden.

  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 combines with the butter to make the sauce.
Butter
Carries flavour and enriches the mushrooms, and browns the bread when fried.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce that coats the mushrooms.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich mushrooms and butter.

The step that matters

Cook the mushrooms gently after adding the stock. Mushrooms hold a lot of water. Cooking them steadily lets that liquid mix with the butter and flour to form a sauce, rather than boiling them into a watery, rubbery mass.

“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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