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Mushrooms Au Naturel

Mushrooms au Naturel is a simple sauté of fresh mushrooms in butter, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 Naturel

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Clean the mushrooms thoroughly.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  3. Add the mushrooms, season with salt and pepper, and let them simmer until tender.

  4. Serve the mushrooms with the butter sauce they were cooked in.

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. Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 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
Form the main body of the dish and release moisture that mixes with the butter as they cook.
Butter
Carries heat into the mushrooms and forms the sauce they are served in, adding richness.

The step that matters

Letting the mushrooms simmer until tender. Mushrooms are mostly water. If the heat is too high or they are crowded, the liquid boils off or they brown unevenly instead of becoming tender in their own juices and butter.

“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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