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Tomato and Mushroom Toast

A toasted bread topped with a sautéed tomato and mushroom mixture flavored with butter, cayenne, lemon juice, and Bovril.

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 ↓

Tomato and Mushroom Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the topping

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and stir in the chopped mushrooms.

  2. Cook the mushrooms with cayenne, lemon juice, and Bovril until heated.

  3. Add the cooked tomatoes and mix well until hot.

  4. Stir in a tablespoon of Bovril mixed with a little hot water.

  5. Add fine bread crumbs until the mixture thickens.

Serve

  1. Spread the mixture on hot buttered toast, optionally with a thin layer of Bovril.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

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

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Cooked tomatoes
Provide the main body, moisture and tomato flavour of the topping.
Chopped mushrooms
Add savoury, meaty texture and earthy flavour to the topping.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour when the mushrooms are cooked.
Bovril
Adds concentrated savoury, salty depth to the mixture.
Fine bread crumbs
Absorb liquid and thicken the mixture so it can be spread.

The step that matters

Adding the bread crumbs. Crumbs absorb liquid and swell as they hydrate, so adding too many quickly makes the topping stiff and dry. Add them gradually until the mixture just thickens.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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