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Mushrooms Stewed in Cream

A creamy mushroom stew made by sautéing mushrooms, thickening with flour and milk, and simmering in cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Mushrooms Stewed in Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Clean the mushrooms and break them into pieces if large.

  2. Sauté the mushrooms in hot butter until tender.

  3. Transfer the mushrooms to a casserole dish.

Make the creamed mushrooms

  1. Cover the mushrooms with milk or cream and let simmer gently for 20 minutes.

  2. In a bowl, blend 1 tablespoon of flour with 3 to 4 tablespoons of milk until smooth.

  3. Add the thickening mixture to the mushrooms when they are about halfway done.

  4. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  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. Mushroom + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

Mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish and release moisture that becomes part of the sauce.
Butter
Fat that browns the mushrooms lightly and carries flavour during sautéing.
Milk or cream
Forms the creamy sauce base that the mushrooms simmer in.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce when blended and added to the simmering mushrooms.

The step that matters

Adding the flour mixture. Flour must be fully blended into milk before adding, or it will clump. Adding it while the mushrooms are only halfway done lets the sauce thicken evenly as the mushrooms finish cooking.

“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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