Skip to main content
Main

To Stew Mushrooms

A stew of button mushrooms cooked with butter, lemon juice, flour, cream or milk, and seasoned with pepper, salt, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

To Stew Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare the mushrooms and place them in a basin of water with a little lemon juice.

  2. Remove the mushrooms from the water and place them in a stewpan with the butter, pepper, salt, lemon juice, flour, cream or milk, and nutmeg.

Stew and serve

  1. Cover the pan closely and let them stew gently for 20 minutes.

  2. If the mushrooms are not perfectly tender, stew them for an additional 5 minutes.

  3. Remove any floating butter and serve.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  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

Mushroom buttons
Form the main body of the dish and soften into a tender, savoury base as they stew.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, carrying flavour through the gentle stewing.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid so the cream or milk forms a smooth sauce.
Cream or milk
Makes the sauce creamy and mellows the flavour of the mushrooms.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the mushrooms pale.

The step that matters

Stew gently with the pan covered. Gentle, covered heat softens the mushrooms and lets them release their liquid without boiling. Boiling hard can toughen the mushrooms and break the cream or milk sauce, so the flour must be stirred in evenly to thicken smoothly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Avocadofits about as well

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

More stewed mushrooms recipes

on Toast 3 See all 138 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes