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To Stew

A stew of Hypholoma mushroom caps simmered in their own gill water, enriched with butter, pepper, salt, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

To Stew

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the caps of the Hypholoma mushrooms.

  2. Stew them slowly in the water retained by the gills for 30 minutes, keeping the dish covered.

  3. Add plenty of butter, pepper, and coarse sea salt to taste.

  4. Incorporate cream or milk with a little thickening.

  5. If the mushrooms have a bitter taste, add a small amount of lemon juice or sherry.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

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

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

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

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

  5. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Caps of hypholoma mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish, softening into a tender, savoury base when stewed.
Cream or milk
Adds richness and creaminess, and with a little thickening gives the stew a smoother body.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavour and giving a silky mouthfeel.

The step that matters

Stewing slowly and covered. Gentle, covered stewing keeps the mushrooms moist and lets their juices mingle with the gill water, so they soften evenly without drying out or toughening.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, butter, pepper, cream):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Mangofits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, pepper, cream. 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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