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Minced Beef Aux Champignons

A stew of minced beef and mushrooms simmered in butter and stock, served on toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Beef and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,232 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Minced Beef Aux Champignons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the butter

  1. Melt butter in a pan, then pour the melted butter into another pan, leaving sediment behind.

  2. Heat butter.

Cook the mushrooms and bread

  1. Fry small rounds of bread until golden.

  2. Remove bread.

  3. Cook mushrooms in butter for 10 minutes after removing skins and stalks.

  4. Season mushrooms with salt and pepper.

  5. Place one mushroom on each piece of bread and arrange them around the edge of a dish.

Make the beef filling

  1. Stir flour into remaining butter until smooth.

  2. Add stock and seasoning, then boil for three minutes.

  3. Stir in minced beef and heat until hot.

  4. Pour mixture into the center of the dish.

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. Beef + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

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

  3. Beef + peppertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

  5. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a smooth, lightly bound sauce.
Butter
Carries flavour and browns the bread and mushrooms while adding richness.
Minced beef
Provides the main savoury body of the filling.
Mushrooms
Adds earthy flavour and a tender, juicy texture.
Stock
Supplies liquid that forms the sauce and carries savoury flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring flour into the butter until smooth. Flour must be cooked briefly in fat before liquid is added; stirring until smooth prevents lumps and removes raw starch taste, so the sauce thickens evenly.

“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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