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Stewed Mushrooms

A simple stew of button mushrooms cooked with water, salt, flour, butter, and finished with cream or egg yolk.

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

Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Stewed Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and simmer

  1. Clean the mushrooms with a wet cloth.

  2. Place them in a saucepan with water and simmer gently for 15 minutes.

Thicken and finish

  1. Add salt, flour, and butter to thicken the liquid to a cream-like consistency, then boil for 5 minutes.

  2. Just before serving, stir in cream or egg yolk and heat for 1 minute without boiling.

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

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

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 and release liquid that forms the sauce as they simmer.
Flour
Thickens the cooking liquid into a cream-like sauce as it heats.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the sauce a smooth, silky mouthfeel.
Cream or egg yolk
Enriches and thickens the sauce, adding richness and smoothness when heated gently.

The step that matters

Stirring in cream or egg yolk. Once the cream or egg yolk is added, boiling can curdle or scramble it and leave the sauce grainy. Heating it gently for just one minute keeps the sauce smooth.

“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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