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Stewed Mushrooms

A simple mushroom stew made with water, butter, lemon juice, cream, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Stewed Mushrooms

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 ↓

Stewed Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak and wash the mushrooms clean.

Stew

  1. In a saucepan, combine water, butter, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

  2. Add the mushrooms and bring to a boil over high heat.

  3. Boil for 10 minutes, stirring constantly.

  4. Thicken the cream with a little flour and stir it in.

  5. Let it boil once more.

  6. Serve in a covered dish.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + mushroomtop 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. Pepper + mushroomtop 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

Fresh mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish and soften as they stew, releasing their flavour into the liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded mouthfeel to the stewing liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and body, and is thickened with flour to create a creamy sauce.
Flour
Thickens the cream so it coats the mushrooms rather than separating into a thin liquid.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the mushrooms pale.

The step that matters

Thickening the cream with flour. Flour must be mixed smoothly into the cream before it goes in, otherwise it forms lumps. Once stirred in, the sauce needs to boil again so the starch fully thickens and loses its raw floury taste.

Swap the lemon

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

  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 butter, pepper, mushroom, cream, flour. 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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