Skip to main content
Main

Mushrooms, Baked

Mushrooms baked with butter and pepper, served hot with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓
Mushrooms, Baked

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 ↓

Mushrooms, Baked

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Cut off a portion of the stalk from the mushrooms and peel the tops.

Bake and serve

  1. Place the mushrooms in a baking dish and add a small piece of butter on each.

  2. Sprinkle with pepper and bake for about 20 minutes, or longer if the mushrooms are large.

  3. Serve immediately on a hot dish, piling the mushrooms in the center and pouring gravy around.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. 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

Mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish, softening and releasing moisture as they bake.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the mushroom tops brown and carrying flavor.

The step that matters

Baking time for large mushrooms. Large mushrooms need longer than the stated 20 minutes to cook through, since heat must penetrate thicker caps and stalks. Underbaked mushrooms stay firm and watery, while the tops need enough heat to soften and concentrate their flavor.

“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.

You might also like