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Mushrooms Stewed in a Cream Sauce

A stew of diced mushrooms simmered in cream sauce, served over toast and garnished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,787 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Mushrooms Stewed in a Cream Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Prepare 1 pint of cream sauce.

  2. Clean and dice ½ pound of mushrooms.

Make and serve

  1. Stew the mushrooms in the cream sauce until very tender.

  2. Prepare toast and pour the mushroom mixture over it.

  3. Garnish with parsley and serve immediately.

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. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Mushroom + parsleytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,132 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Cream + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

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

  4. Sauce + mushroomtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,480 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sauce + parsleytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,693 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cream sauce
Forms the creamy, thick body of the stew and keeps the mushrooms moist.
Mushrooms
Release their moisture into the sauce and turn tender and savoury as they stew.

The step that matters

Stew the mushrooms in the cream sauce until very tender. Cream can curdle or scorch if it boils hard, so a gentle simmer is safer. Stewing slowly lets the mushrooms soften fully and absorb flavour from the sauce.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sauce, mushroom):

  1. Garlicfits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sauce, mushroom. 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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