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To Stew Canned Mushrooms

A simple stew made with canned mushrooms, milk, butter, flour, and egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter 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 ↓

To Stew Canned Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat butter in a stew pan until hot.

  2. Add flour and mix until smooth.

  3. Pour in milk and stir continuously until it boils.

  4. Add mushrooms, salt, and pepper, stirring until heated through.

  5. Remove from heat, stir in beaten egg yolk, 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. Milk + buttertop 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

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and adds a rich, savory flavor.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce that the flour thickens.
Egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce when stirred in off the heat.
Mushrooms
Provide the main savory flavor and texture of the stew.

The step that matters

Stir in the egg yolk off the heat. Egg yolk can scramble and turn grainy if it meets high heat. Removing the pan from the heat first lets the yolk thicken the sauce gently and smoothly.

“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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