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Eighteen Button Mushrooms

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,173 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Eighteen Button Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Truss the chicken as for boiling and place it in a stewpan with enough boiling water to cover.

  2. Boil and remove the scum.

  3. Add the carrot, onion, thyme, bay leaf, celery, parsley, cloves, peppercorns, mace, and chicken stock; boil gently for about an hour until the chicken is done.

  4. Remove the chicken and cut it into neat joints.

  5. In another stewpan, mix butter and flour together.

  6. Add the mushroom stalks and trimmings along with the chicken stock, skimming off the grease; stir until it boils and let it simmer for 20 minutes with the lid half on.

  7. Skim off the butter that rises to the top and reduce the sauce to one pint.

  8. Flavor the sauce with lemon juice, then add the cream.

  9. Place the mushrooms and chicken pieces in a stewpan, strain the sauce over them, and heat until hot.

  10. Garnish with fleurons of puff paste.

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. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Thyme + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Mushroom + thymetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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, cream, butter, flour, carrot, thyme, celery):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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

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