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Mushrooms

A boiled mushroom dish flavored with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. If using old mushrooms, soak them in boiling water for five minutes.

  2. Cut the mushrooms into small pieces.

  3. Boil the mushrooms in a saucepan for ten minutes.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix a little flour into a piece of butter to create a paste.

  2. Stir the butter paste into the mushrooms.

  3. Add pepper and salt to taste.

  4. Bring to a boil once more and serve in an oyster dish.

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

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

  2. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Old mushrooms
Provide the main body and savory mushroom flavor of the stew.
Butter
Carries the flour into the liquid and adds richness to the stew.
Flour
Thickens the stew as its starch swells with heat, giving it body.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour paste into the mushrooms. Flour clumps if added raw to hot liquid. Blending it first into butter coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly and thicken smoothly when the stew is brought back to a boil.

“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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