Name: Simple Stew of Mushrooms
Ingredients: 1 pint mushrooms; 1 tablespoon butter; salt; pepper

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 ↓

Simple Stew of Mushrooms

Ingredients

1 pint mushrooms
1 tablespoon butter
salt
pepper

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

Clean the mushrooms.
Cut the mushrooms into small pieces.

Cook and serve

In a stew pan, combine the mushrooms, butter, salt, and pepper.
Let the mixture simmer for 10 minutes.
Serve hot.

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.

Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + peppertop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together85,593 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms: Form the body of the stew and release moisture that becomes the cooking liquid as they simmer.
Butter: Adds fat for richness and carries flavor through the mushrooms as they cook.

“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.