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Dessert

Croute Aux Mushrooms

A sautéed mushroom dish finished with lemon, garlic, and egg yolks, served with fried bread snippets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Croute Aux Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the mushrooms

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan over high heat.

  2. Add the mushrooms and sauté until they are tender.

  3. Remove the pan from heat and squeeze in the lemon juice. Return the pan to heat for a few minutes.

  4. Season the mushrooms with salt, pepper, and spices.

Add the garlic and finish

  1. Infuse the garlic in the water for 30 minutes.

  2. Add the infused garlic and water to the mushrooms.

  3. Let the mixture stew until the mushrooms are fully cooked.

  4. Stir in the beaten egg yolks until well combined.

  5. Serve the mushrooms on a dish garnished with fried bread snippets.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Mushroom + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,700 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Make up the bulk of the dish and soften into a tender, savoury base.
Butter
Adds fat and richness while carrying the mushrooms' flavour as they cook.
Egg yolks
Thicken the mixture and bind it into a creamy, cohesive texture when stirred in.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mushrooms and balances their richness.

The step that matters

Stirring in the beaten egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken when heated but can scramble into lumps if the mixture is too hot. Stir them in off the heat or over gentle heat and keep stirring so they combine smoothly.

Swap the clove

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, lemon, pepper, garlic, egg, 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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