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Stewed Mushrooms

A simple dish of mushrooms stewed with lemon juice, butter, pepper, and salt, optionally finished with béchamel or coulis.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare

  1. Peel the mushrooms very thin and place them in water with the lemon juice.

Cook

  1. Melt a bit of butter in a saucepan over low heat.

  2. Add the mushrooms, pepper, and salt to the saucepan.

  3. Cook for about 15 minutes over low heat.

  4. If desired, add a little béchamel for a white sauce or coulis for a brown sauce.

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 + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

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

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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 stew and release moisture as they cook.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the mushrooms brown gently in the pan.
Lemon juice
Acidity that helps keep the peeled mushrooms pale in the water.

The step that matters

Cooking the mushrooms over low heat. Low heat lets mushrooms release their liquid slowly and cook through evenly without scorching the butter or drying the pieces. Rushing with high heat can make them tough and unevenly browned.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Avocadofits less well

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