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Mushrooms

Creamed mushrooms sautéed with butter, flour, thick cream, parsley, onion, cloves, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Mushrooms

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and scrape the inside of the mushrooms.

  2. Soak them in saltwater, then rub with flannel.

Cook and finish

  1. Boil the mushrooms in fresh saltwater until tender.

  2. Add parsley and an onion with cloves.

  3. Toss with butter rolled in flour.

  4. Stir in thick cream and pieces of nutmeg.

  5. 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, becoming tender when boiled.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour across the mushrooms.
Flour
Thickens the butter and juices into a light coating that clings to the mushrooms.
Thick cream
Adds moisture and richness, turning the coating into a creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Toss with butter rolled in flour. Coating the mushrooms with flour-thickened butter before adding cream lets the flour cook out and thicken the sauce evenly. Clumps of raw flour would leave a pasty taste and lumps.

Swap the onion

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

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

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