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Stewed Mushrooms

A simple stew of mushrooms simmered with butter, lemon, and seasonings, served hot over buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Stewed Mushrooms

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 Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the ends of the mushroom stalks and pare the mushrooms carefully.

  2. Soak the mushrooms in a basin of water with a little lemon juice.

  3. After preparing, remove the mushrooms from the water and place them in a stewpan.

Stew and thicken

  1. Add butter, pepper, salt, and lemon juice, then cover the pan.

  2. Let the mushrooms stew gently for 20 to 30 minutes.

  3. Thicken the gravy in the pan with flour.

Serve

  1. Lay a slice of buttered toast in a covered dish and pour the mushrooms over it.

  2. 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.

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.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

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

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 main body of the dish and release juices that become the gravy as they stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the gravy a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a gravy as it heats with the mushroom juices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the mushrooms pale while soaking.

The step that matters

Stewing gently with the lid on. Gentle, covered heat lets mushrooms release their moisture slowly and become tender. Boiling hard toughens them and can make the gravy break or turn stringy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

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