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Creamed Mushrooms

A creamy mushroom side dish served over toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Creamed Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and slice the mushrooms.

Cook

  1. In a skillet, melt the butter over medium heat and cook the mushrooms for 8 minutes.

  2. Sprinkle the flour over the mushrooms and stir until well mixed.

  3. Add the cream and season with salt and pepper.

  4. Cook until the mixture thickens, then serve over toast.

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

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

Butter and flour 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
Form the bulk of the dish and release moisture that cooks down into the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavour while the mushrooms cook.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a smooth, creamy sauce.
Cream
Provides moisture and fat that set into a silky sauce as it thickens.

The step that matters

Cook until the mixture thickens. Flour needs continued gentle cooking in the liquid to fully swell and thicken the sauce, and cooking too briefly leaves a pasty, floury taste. Cooking too hard can cause the cream to split or scorch.

“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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