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Souffle of Mushrooms

A baked mushroom soufflé made with a white sauce, eggs, and sliced mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Souffle of Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the base

  1. Melt the butter.

  2. Whisk in the flour until smooth.

  3. Gradually add the cream and mushroom liquor, stirring until thickened.

  4. Season the sauce with salt, pepper, and lemon juice, then stir in the sliced mushrooms.

Add the eggs

  1. Separate the eggs.

  2. Beat the yolks until thick and mix them into the mushroom mixture.

  3. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form.

  4. Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the mixture.

Bake and serve

  1. Pour the mixture into a buttered dish and bake at 300°F (150°C) for about 20 minutes, or until firm.

  2. Serve immediately.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the base and helps form the roux with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter and cream into a smooth sauce that holds the dish together.
Eggs
Yolks enrich and thicken the base; whipped whites lift the mixture and give the soufflé its airy structure.
Thin cream
Adds moisture and richness to the sauce base.
Mushrooms
Provide the main earthy flavour and some moisture in the mixture.

The step that matters

Folding in the beaten egg whites. Overmixing knocks out the air trapped in the whites, so the soufflé rises less and turns dense. Fold gently, just until no streaks of white remain.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, cream, mushroom, pepper, egg):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits less well
  4. Plumfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, cream, mushroom, pepper, egg. 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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