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To Stew Mushrooms

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

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 ↓

To Stew Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the part of the stem that grows underground and wash the mushrooms carefully.

  2. Remove the skin from the top of the mushrooms.

  3. Place the mushrooms in a stew pan with salt, but do not add water.

Stew and finish

  1. Stew the mushrooms until tender.

  2. Thicken the stew with 1 tablespoon of butter mixed with 1 tablespoon of brown flour.

  3. Add 2 tablespoons of cream and bring to a boil.

  4. Serve with slices of bread.

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

Large button mushrooms
Provide the main body of the dish, softening as they stew in their own moisture.
Fresh butter
Adds richness and carries the flour so it can thicken the stew smoothly.
Brown flour
Thickens the stewing liquid into a spoonable sauce when cooked with butter.
Heavy cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the thickened stew.

The step that matters

Thicken the stew with the butter and flour mixture. Flour must be blended with butter before it goes in, so it disperses evenly without lumps. Cooking it briefly lets the starch swell and thicken the liquid.

Swap the lemon

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