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Mushrooms Au Beurre

Mushrooms sautéed in butter with salt, mace, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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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 Au Beurre

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the stems from the mushrooms and clean them with a bit of flannel and fine salt.

  2. Wipe them dry with a soft cloth or rinse in fresh water, then drain quickly.

  3. Spread the mushrooms in a clean cloth, fold it over, and let them dry for at least 10 minutes.

Cook and serve

  1. In a thick iron saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat until it just begins to brown.

  2. Add the mushrooms and shake the saucepan over the heat to prevent sticking.

  3. Simmer for 3 to 4 minutes, then add salt, cayenne, and mace.

  4. Continue cooking until the mushrooms are perfectly tender.

  5. Serve the mushrooms with their own sauce.

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. 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. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + macetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 recipes

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

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Meadow mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish, releasing their own liquid that becomes the sauce as they cook.
Butter
Carries the heat and adds richness, and its browning gives the dish a nutty aroma.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the mushrooms and draws out moisture that helps form the sauce.

The step that matters

Shaking the mushrooms into the browning butter. Mushrooms can stick and scorch in hot fat, so keeping them moving spreads the heat evenly and prevents burnt spots that would taint the sauce.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

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.

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