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Creamed Mushrooms

Creamed Mushrooms is a dish of sautéed mushrooms in a butter and cream sauce seasoned with lemon, black pepper, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Creamed Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Pare the mushroom buttons and soak them in cold water with lemon juice.

  2. Remove the mushrooms from the water and place them in a stew-pan with enough boiling salted water to prevent burning.

  3. Stew the mushrooms until tender.

Make the cream sauce

  1. In a separate pot, thicken the sweet cream with flour and bring to a boil.

  2. While boiling, add butter, black pepper, and cayenne pepper.

  3. Add the mushrooms to the hot cream, boil for 1 minute, and serve in a hot deep dish.

  4. Optionally, add a little more lemon juice before serving.

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

Mushroom buttons
Provide the main body of the dish, becoming tender when stewed.
Sweet cream
Forms the rich sauce that coats the mushrooms.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a smooth, coating sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the cream sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the mushrooms pale.

The step that matters

Thicken the cream before adding the mushrooms. Flour must be cooked in hot cream long enough to swell and thicken; adding it raw or undercooked leaves a floury taste and a thin sauce. Bringing the cream to a boil also helps the starch set before the mushrooms are added.

Swap the lemon

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