Name: Mushroom Soup
Ingredients: good quantity of mushrooms; 2 tablespoons butter; ¼ teaspoon pepper; ¼ teaspoon coarse sea salt; 2 cups good stock; 1 tablespoon cream or milk (optional)

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 ↓

Mushroom Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

Cut off the earthy ends of the mushrooms, then pick and wash them.
Stew the mushrooms with butter, pepper, and salt in a little stock until tender.
Remove the mushrooms and chop them finely.

Make the soup

Prepare a good stock as for any other soup.
Add the chopped mushrooms and the liquid they were stewed in to the stock.
Boil all together and serve.
For a white soup, use white button mushrooms and veal stock, adding cream or milk as needed for color.

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.

Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,516 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,500 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms: Form the body of the soup and give it its main flavor.
Butter: Adds richness and carries flavor while the mushrooms stew until tender.
Stock: Provides the liquid base that the soup is built on.
Cream or milk: Adds richness and softens the color of the soup when used.

“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.