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Oyster Mushrooms

A creamy sauce of oyster mushrooms cooked with butter, milk, flour, nutmeg, onion juice, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and milk 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 ↓

Oyster Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and dry the mushrooms, then cut them into strips crosswise of the gills, trimming off the woody parts near the stem.

  2. Combine the mushrooms with 1 tablespoon of butter and ½ teaspoon of salt in a saucepan.

Cook and finish

  1. Cover and cook slowly for 20 minutes.

  2. Moisten 1 tablespoon of flour in ½ cup of milk until smooth, then add another ½ cup of milk.

  3. Add the milk mixture to the mushroom mixture and bring to a boil.

  4. Stir in a grating of nutmeg, a few drops of onion juice, and a dash of pepper.

  5. Serve as you would stewed oysters.

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. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  2. Nutmeg + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Oyster mushroom + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Oyster mushroom + flourtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together18 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Oyster mushrooms
Provide the main body, texture and savory flavor of the dish.
Milk
Forms the creamy liquid that thickens into a smooth sauce around the mushrooms.
Flour
Thickens the milk so the sauce becomes smooth and clings to the mushrooms.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor as the mushrooms cook.

The step that matters

Moisten the flour in milk until smooth. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid dry. Mixing it into cold milk first lets the starch disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly when it boils.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oyster mushroom, butter, milk, flour, nutmeg, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oyster mushroom, butter, milk, flour, nutmeg, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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