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Mushrooms Stewed

A stew of mushrooms cooked with butter, pepper, salt, lemon juice, and thickened with flour and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Mushrooms Stewed

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Keep the mushrooms in water with lemon juice while paring.

  2. Strain the mushrooms and place them in a stew pan.

Stew and finish

  1. Add butter, pepper, salt, and lemon juice; let them stew for 30 minutes until tender.

  2. Thicken with flour mixed with cream, and boil together.

  3. If serving brown, add brown sauce before serving.

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. Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,787 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish, softening as they stew until tender.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour as the mushrooms stew.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a light sauce when boiled with cream.
Cream
Adds richness and body to the sauce once it is thickened with flour.

The step that matters

Thickening with flour and cream. Flour must be mixed smoothly with the cream before it goes in, and the mixture must boil. Flour added lumpy or unboiled leaves a raw floury taste and a thin, grainy sauce, because starch only thickens fully once it has been heated to a boil.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, butter, pepper, flour, cream, sauce):

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

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