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Cream of Mushrooms

A creamy mushroom soup made with fresh mushrooms, water, butter, flour, cream, salt, pepper, and topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Cream of Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Wash and peel the mushrooms, discarding the stems, and chop them finely.

  2. In a saucepan, combine the chopped mushrooms and water, cover, and cook for 20 minutes.

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a separate bowl, blend the butter and flour until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the cream to the butter and flour mixture, stirring until smooth.

  3. Add the cooked mushrooms and their liquid to the cream mixture, stirring well.

Season and serve

  1. Season with salt and pepper, and serve with a tablespoon of whipped cream in each dish.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh mushrooms
Provide the main flavour and bulk of the soup, releasing liquid as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and forms the base for the flour-thickened sauce.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the cream by swelling with the butter and liquid to give a smooth body.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the finished soup.

The step that matters

Blending the butter and flour, then adding the cream gradually. Flour clumps if it meets liquid too quickly. Blending it with butter first and adding cream slowly, while stirring, lets the starch disperse evenly so the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps.

“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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