Name: Mushrooms Au Gratin
Ingredients: 10 cup mushrooms; 1 small onion; 2 teaspoons chopped parsley; ¼ teaspoon dried thyme (or ⅛ teaspoon fresh thyme); butter for frying; dried bread crumbs

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Mushrooms Au Gratin

Ingredients

Directions

Carefully peel the mushrooms without breaking them and remove the stalks.
Scoop out the inside of each mushroom cup to make it hollow.
Peel and chop the stalks and mix with the scooped mushroom parts and chopped onion.
Fry the mixture in a little butter until fragrant.
Add enough dried bread crumbs to form a moist paste.
Fill each mushroom cup with the mixture, creating a convex top.

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.

Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together9,057 recipes

Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).
Mushroom + thymetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,557 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together11,171 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

Swap the onion

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

Shallotfits better
Leekfits better
Carrotfits better
Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, parsley, thyme, butter, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.