Name: Mushroom Purée, Brown
Ingredients: 1 pound mushrooms; 2 ounces butter; 1 tablespoon brown stock; coarse sea salt, to taste; black pepper, to taste; a few drops of lemon juice

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 ↓

Mushroom Purée, Brown

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

Remove the gills from the mushrooms and chop them finely.
Melt the butter in a pan and add the mushrooms.
Cook until the mushrooms are nearly done, then add the brown stock.

Season and thicken

Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.
Cook until the mixture thickens enough to drop from a spoon.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,633 recipes

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

Mushrooms: Provide the main body and earthy flavour of the purée as they break down while cooking.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, helping the mushrooms brown and carry flavour.
Brown stock: Adds savoury depth and liquid that helps the mixture cook down into a purée.

The step that matters

Cook until the mixture thickens enough to drop from a spoon. Mushrooms release a lot of water as they cook. Reducing that liquid by cooking further concentrates the flavour and gives the purée a thick, spoonable texture. Stopping too early leaves it watery.