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Mushroom-toast, or Croute Aux Champignons

A toasted bread topped with sautéed mushrooms, butter, mace, cayenne, flour, broth, and lemon juice.

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 ↓

Mushroom-toast, or Croute Aux Champignons

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mushroom sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Add the mushrooms, mace, and cayenne; stir and cook for 10 to 15 minutes, stirring often.

  3. Sprinkle in the flour and stir until lightly browned.

  4. Gradually add the gravy or broth and simmer for 2 minutes.

  5. Season with salt and lemon juice.

Prepare and serve

  1. Fry the bread in butter until light brown, or grill it after buttering.

  2. Spoon the mushroom mixture over the prepared bread.

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. Mushroom + beeftop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,232 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 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

Mushrooms
Form the main body of the topping and release moisture as they cook.
Butter
Carries the cooking of the mushrooms and adds richness and browning to the bread.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a sauce and helps it brown lightly.
Gravy or beef broth
Provides the liquid base for the sauce and savoury depth.
Bread
Gives a crisp, absorbent base that holds the mushroom sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour until lightly browned. Flour must cook in the fat long enough to lose its raw taste and thicken evenly, but if it browns too far it turns bitter and darkens the sauce. Keep stirring and watch the colour closely.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, pepper, flour, beef, lemon, 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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