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Broiled Puffballs on Toast

Broiled slices of puffball mushrooms served on toast, seasoned with butter, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Broiled Puffballs on Toast

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the puffballs and cut them into slices ½ inch thick.

  2. Brush the slices with melted butter or olive oil.

Broil and serve

  1. Broil the slices in a double gridiron over a slow fire for 5 to 8 minutes, turning once.

  2. Place the broiled puffballs on thin slices of toast.

  3. Season with pepper, coarse sea salt, a few drops of lemon juice, and melted butter.

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. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Pepper + breadtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,964 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + breadtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,445 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Puffballs
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and mild when broiled.
Melted butter or olive oil
Carries heat evenly across the slices and helps them brown lightly while broiling.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mild flavor of the mushrooms.
Bread for toast
Provides a crisp base that soaks up juices from the broiled slices.

The step that matters

Broiling the slices over a slow fire. Puffball flesh holds a lot of water, so gentle heat lets moisture escape and the slices cook through and brown instead of steaming. Turning once helps both sides cook evenly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Figfits about as well
  3. Plumfits less well
  4. Mangofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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