Skip to main content
Main

Blanched Mushrooms

Mushrooms sautéed in butter with lemon juice, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Blanched Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the mushrooms by peeling and trimming the stalks.

  2. Soak the mushrooms in a basin of cold water mixed with lemon juice.

  3. Drain the mushrooms.

Cook and season

  1. Fry them in butter for 7-8 minutes.

  2. Season with pepper and salt to taste.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + buttertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh button mushrooms
Main ingredient that softens and browns when fried, giving the dish its texture and bulk.
Butter
Fat that carries heat evenly, helps the mushrooms brown, and adds rich flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity for brightness and slows discolouration of the mushrooms during soaking.

The step that matters

Drain the mushrooms well before frying. Mushrooms hold a lot of water. If they are wet or crowded in the pan, they steam instead of browning, so they stay pale and soft rather than golden.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Mangofits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

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

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes