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Easy Mushroom Soup

A creamy soup made with mushrooms, milk, and butter, seasoned with salt and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Easy Mushroom Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Peel and wash the mushrooms.

  2. Simmer the mushrooms in a little water for 10 minutes.

  3. Remove the mushrooms and chop them finely, reserving the water as stock.

Make the soup

  1. Prepare the milk as you would for any cream soup, adding a little flour to thicken it.

  2. Stir in plenty of butter, salt, and a little cayenne pepper.

  3. Add the chopped mushrooms and reserved stock to the milk, and serve very hot.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

  3. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Mushroom + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

Mushrooms
Provide the main flavor and body of the soup once chopped and added.
Milk
Forms the creamy base of the soup.
Flour
Thickens the milk so the soup becomes creamy rather than watery.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Thickening the milk with flour. Flour must be mixed in so it hydrates and its starch swells evenly in the warm milk; if it is added in lumps or not cooked enough, the soup stays grainy or tastes raw and floury.

“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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