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Fricassee Mushrooms

A sautéed mushroom dish with butter, flour, cream, parsley, onion, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Fricassee Mushrooms

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Peel and scrape the mushrooms.

  2. Soak them in saltwater.

  3. Rub the mushrooms with a cloth.

Cook and finish

  1. Boil them in fresh saltwater until tender.

  2. Add parsley and the onion.

  3. Toss with butter and flour.

  4. Stir in cream.

  5. Stir in nutmeg.

  6. Remove the nutmeg and onion before serving.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Parsley + nutmegtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,062 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

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

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

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 soften into tender pieces when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when tossed with butter and the cooking liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and body, giving the sauce a smooth, silky texture.

The step that matters

Toss with butter and flour. Flour needs to be coated evenly in fat before liquid is added; otherwise it clumps and the sauce turns lumpy instead of smooth.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, butter, flour, parsley, clove, cream, nutmeg):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, flour, parsley, clove, cream, nutmeg. 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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