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Raising Mushrooms At Home

A simple mushroom stew or sauté, cooked with butter, salt, pepper, and optional cream or milk.

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

Raising Mushrooms At Home

Ingredients

Directions

Stew the mushrooms

  1. Wash mushrooms in water and drain them, gills downward, on a cloth or in a colander.

  2. Place mushrooms in a stew pan with a little water.

  3. Cover and stew slowly for 20 minutes.

  4. Add butter, salt, and pepper to taste.

Fry the mushrooms

  1. Butter a medium-hot pan.

  2. Cut mushrooms into equal-sized pieces.

  3. Fry them, stirring occasionally until done.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

Make the gravy

  1. Use water, milk, or cream to make gravy.

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. 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
Give the stew its main body and savory flavor, and release moisture as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the mushrooms brown in the pan.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and creaminess to the gravy.

The step that matters

Frying the mushrooms in a medium-hot pan. Mushrooms release water as they cook. In a crowded or cool pan they steam instead of browning, so cut them into even pieces and stir occasionally so the moisture evaporates and they brown.

“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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