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Stewed Mushrooms

A stew of button mushrooms cooked with water, salt, flour, butter, and finished with cream or egg yolk.

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

  1. Wipe the mushrooms clean with a wet cloth.

  2. Place them in a stew pan with a little water and stew gently for 15 minutes.

Thicken and finish

  1. Add salt to taste, then stir in flour and butter to thicken the liquid to the consistency of cream.

  2. Boil for 5 minutes.

  3. Just before serving, stir in the cream or egg yolk and heat for 1 minute without boiling.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Button mushrooms
Provide the main body of the stew and release their liquid as they stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so it becomes creamy in consistency.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the thickened sauce taste smooth.
Cream or egg yolk
Enriches the sauce and adds smoothness when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Stir in the cream or egg yolk off the boil. Egg yolk proteins coagulate and can curdle or turn grainy when overheated. Adding it just before serving and heating only briefly, without boiling, keeps the sauce smooth.

“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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