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Stewed Mushrooms

A simple side dish of button mushrooms stewed with butter, flour, and cream or egg yolk.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Stewed Mushrooms

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 ↓

Stewed Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wipe the mushrooms clean with a wet cloth.

Stew and thicken

  1. Place them in a saucepan with a little water and stew gently for 15 minutes.

  2. Add salt to taste.

  3. Mix in the flour and butter to thicken the liquid to the consistency of cream.

  4. Boil for 5 minutes.

  5. Stir in the cream or egg yolk.

  6. Heat for 1 minute without boiling.

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

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 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 and flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a creamy sauce as the flour-coated butter melts and swells.
Cream or egg yolk
Adds richness and body to the finished sauce.
Button mushrooms
Supply the main body of the dish and release moisture as they stew.

The step that matters

Stir in the cream or egg yolk. Once the sauce is boiling, egg yolk can scramble and curdle, so the dish is heated only gently for one minute without boiling after it is added.

“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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