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Stewed Cepes

Stewed cepes is a mushroom stew cooked with butter, flour, lemon juice, stock, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Stewed Cepes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the cepes into cubes.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and add the cepes and flour.

  2. Stir until the mixture is a light coffee brown.

  3. Add the stock and seasonings, then simmer for five minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve on toast as an entree or use as a garnish for broiled fish.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

Cepes (in the method)
Provide the main flavor and bulk of the dish.
Butter
Carries flavor and adds richness, and browns to deepen the taste.
Flour
Thickens the mixture with the butter as it cooks to a light brown.
Stock
Supplies the liquid that becomes the sauce and moistens the mushrooms.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, buttery flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring to a light coffee brown. The butter and flour mixture can scorch quickly once it darkens. Browning them gently gives a nutty, deeper flavor and helps thicken the sauce, while going too far turns it bitter.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, lemon, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, lemon, pepper. 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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