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White Mushroom Puree

Mushroom puree shaped into cutlets, simmered in water, served with vegetables and sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom 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 ↓

White Mushroom Puree

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the moulds

  1. Butter the cutlet moulds.

Make the quenelles

  1. Prepare the mushroom mixture as for quenelles, seasoning with salt, pepper, cayenne, and nutmeg.

  2. Fill the moulds with the mixture and smooth the surface with a warm, wet palette knife.

  3. Place the moulds in a stew-pan with boiling water to three-quarters of their depth.

  4. Cover with buttered paper and a lid, then simmer for 15 minutes or until firm.

Serve

  1. Turn out the moulds and arrange them around a potato border, slightly overlapping.

  2. Fill the center with suitable vegetables and pour a little rich sauce over them.

  3. Add more sauce around the base, about ½ cup.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Mushroom + peastop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together890 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

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

  5. Mushroom + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,988 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

White mushrooms
Form the main body of the quenelles and give them their earthy flavour.
Butter
Greases the moulds so the quenelles release cleanly after cooking.
Rich sauce
Adds moisture and richness to the finished dish around the quenelles.

The step that matters

Simmer the moulds gently. Water that boils hard or is too high can make the mixture rise unevenly or crack, so a gentle simmer sets it smoothly and firmly.

Swap the peas

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, mushroom, pepper, nutmeg, sauce):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Beansfits better
  3. Walnutfits better
  4. Peasthe original

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

“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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