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Mushroom Soup

A mushroom soup made by stewing mushrooms in butter, pepper, salt, and stock, then adding them back to stock and boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Mushroom Soup

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 ↓

Mushroom Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Cut off the earthy end of the mushrooms, then pick and wash them.

  2. Stew the mushrooms in butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt in a little good stock until tender.

  3. Remove the mushrooms and chop them finely.

Make the soup

  1. Prepare a good stock as for any other soup.

  2. Add the chopped mushrooms and the liquid they were stewed in to the stock.

  3. Boil all together and serve.

Variation

  1. For a white soup, use white button mushrooms and good veal stock, adding 1 tablespoon of cream or a little milk as needed for color.

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. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

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

  5. 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
Provide the main flavor and body of the soup.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor when the mushrooms are stewed.
Good stock
Forms the liquid base that carries the mushroom flavor.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and softens the color of the soup in the white version.

The step that matters

Stew the mushrooms until tender. Mushrooms are mostly water, and stewing them slowly in butter and their own liquid concentrates their flavor. Stopping too early leaves them tough and dilutes the soup.

“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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