Skip to main content
Main

Mushrooms an Gratin

Mushrooms stuffed with onion, parsley, thyme, butter, and breadcrumbs, baked until golden.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Mushrooms an Gratin

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 the mushrooms

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

  2. Carefully peel the mushrooms and scoop out the insides to make them hollow.

  3. Remove the stalks and chop them with the scooped-out part and the onion.

Make the filling

  1. In a frying pan, melt the butter and fry the mixture for 1 minute.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon peel or juice.

  3. Stir in enough bread crumbs to form a moist paste.

  4. Fill the mushroom cups with the mixture, smoothing the tops.

Bake and serve

  1. Dredge with fine bread crumbs and place in a baking tin with a little oil or butter.

  2. Bake until the mushrooms are cooked through, being careful not to break them.

  3. Drain excess fat and serve on a hot dish, garnished with fried parsley.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,973 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 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
Their hollow cups hold the filling, and their moisture softens as they cook through.
Butter
Fat that softens the onion and carries flavour into the filling, and helps the crumb top brown.
Onion
Sweetness and aroma that build the base flavour of the filling as it softens.
Fine bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and bind the chopped filling into a paste that holds its shape.

The step that matters

Stir in the bread crumbs to a moist paste. Too many crumbs make the filling dry and crumbly, while too few leave it wet and loose. The moist paste holds its shape in the cups and keeps the filling from falling out during baking.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, walnut, parsley, thyme, butter, pepper, lemon. 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

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes