Skip to main content
Main

To Stew Mushrooms

A mushroom stew made with button and flap mushrooms, butter, flour, cream, salt, peppercorns, and served with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

To Stew Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub the large button mushrooms with salt using a piece of flannel.

  2. Cut out the fur from the mushrooms and remove the skin from the small flaps.

  3. Sprinkle the mushrooms with salt and place them in a stew-pan with peppercorns.

Stew and finish

  1. Simmer slowly until cooked through.

  2. Add a small bit of butter, a little flour, and two tablespoons of cream.

  3. Bring to a boil and serve with toasted bread.

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. 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

Button mushrooms
Main body of the dish; they soften and release their juices as they stew.
Flap mushrooms
Add tender, meaty texture and flavor to the stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat that carries flavor and rounds out the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light, smooth sauce when heated.
Cream
Adds richness and body, giving the sauce a smooth, velvety finish.

The step that matters

Add the flour, butter and cream, then bring to a boil. Flour needs to be heated in the liquid to cook out its raw taste and thicken properly. Cream can split or curdle if boiled hard for too long, so bring it up to a boil gently and serve promptly.

“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.

More stewed mushrooms recipes

on Toast 3 See all 138 →

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes