Skip to main content
Main

Stewed Mushrooms

A dish of sautéed mushrooms simmered in tomato sauce, seasoned with salt, pepper, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Stewed Mushrooms

Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Stewed Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Peel the mushrooms and trim the stems.

  2. Fry the mushrooms in the butter for five minutes.

  3. Season with salt and pepper, then add the tomato sauce.

  4. Turn down the heat and simmer gently for another fifteen minutes.

Serve

  1. Serve hot on a warm dish, sprinkled with parsley.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

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

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Parsley + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,398 recipes

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

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 and release moisture that becomes part of the sauce as they cook.
Butter
Fat that browns the mushrooms and carries flavour through the frying stage.
Tomato sauce
Adds acidity and body, and its liquid thickens and flavours the mushrooms during simmering.

The step that matters

Simmer gently after adding the tomato sauce. Once the heat is turned down, a gentle simmer lets the liquid reduce slowly and the flavours blend without the sauce scorching or the mushrooms turning tough from rapid boiling.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Carrotfits about as well
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, parsley, sauce, 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.

More stewed mushrooms recipes

on Toast 3 See all 138 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipes