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To Stew Mushrooms

A stew of button mushrooms cooked with salt, pepper, butter, flour, and optional cayenne pepper and cream, served with bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

To Stew Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the mushrooms by rubbing them with salt and a cloth.

  2. Place them in a stew pan with peppercorns and sprinkle with salt.

Cook

  1. Simmer gently until cooked through.

  2. Add butter rolled in flour and stir to combine.

  3. For an improvement, add Cayenne pepper and ½ cup of heavy cream.

Serve

  1. Serve with slices of bread.

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 + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  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 + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

  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

Large button mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish and release moisture as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the cooking liquid.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid when rolled into the butter and stirred in.
Heavy cream
Adds richness and body, softening the flavour and thickening the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour. Flour added directly to hot liquid can clump; rolling it into butter first lets it disperse evenly and thicken smoothly as it is stirred.

“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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