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Stewed Mushrooms

A savory dish of mushrooms simmered with water, salt, butter, flour, pepper, and cream, served over toast.

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

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 ↓

Stewed Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare the mushrooms and place them in a stew pan.

Stew

  1. Add water and salt, then simmer slowly for 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in butter, flour, pepper, and cream.

  2. Boil once, then serve over toast.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

Mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish and release savory juices as they stew.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded fat flavor to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid as its starch swells with heat.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Boil once, then serve. Flour needs heat to swell its starch and thicken the sauce, so the mixture must come to a boil. Cream is rich and can separate or turn grainy if it is boiled hard or for too long, so bring it up once and serve promptly.

“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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