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Mushrooms, Stewed

A creamy stew of button mushrooms cooked with butter, lemon, flour, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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. Remove the skins and cut off the ends of the stalks of the mushrooms.

Cook the mushrooms

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan, then add the mushrooms and lemon juice.

  2. Season with salt and pepper, cover closely, and cook gently for about 30 minutes, shaking the pan occasionally.

Thicken and serve

  1. Mix the flour and cream or milk smoothly together, then pour into the stewpan.

  2. Stir until the mixture boils, then simmer for about 10 minutes to cook the flour.

  3. If the mushrooms are tender, season to taste and serve.

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. Lemon + peppertop 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. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Button mushrooms
Provide the main body of the dish, softening and releasing their juices as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour as it melts in the pan with the mushrooms.
Cream or milk
Combined with flour to form a smooth sauce that thickens and gives a creamy texture.
Flour
Thickens the cream or milk into a sauce once it boils and is simmered.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the mushrooms and cream.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the boiling liquid. Flour mixed smoothly with cream or milk before adding helps prevent lumps. Stirring until it boils and then simmering cooks out the raw flour taste and lets the starch thicken the sauce.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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

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