Skip to main content
Main

Creamed Mushrooms

Creamed mushrooms are sautéed mushrooms finished in a butter‑flour sauce with cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Creamed Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Examine and trim the mushrooms, rinsing them well.

  2. Break large mushrooms into pieces and cook in an enamel saucepan with just enough boiling water to cover the bottom.

  3. Sprinkle the mushrooms with coarse sea salt and cover with a lid.

  4. Once cooked, drain the mushrooms, saving the liquid, and measure the mushrooms.

Make the sauce

  1. For each cup of mushrooms, mix 1½ cups of the saved liquid with ½ cup of cream.

  2. In a separate pan, melt 2 tablespoons of butter and whisk in 2 tablespoons of flour to make a sauce, seasoning lightly.

Combine and serve

  1. Add the mushrooms to the sauce, heat briefly, and pour over hot buttered toast. Serve immediately.

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

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

  2. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 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).

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

Mushrooms
Provide the main body and earthy flavor of the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the roux base of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with melted butter to form a roux.
Cream
Adds richness and body, giving the sauce a smooth, creamy texture.

The step that matters

Whisking flour into the melted butter. Cooking the flour briefly in the fat, while whisking constantly, lets it dissolve smoothly into the liquid. Adding it lumpy or without stirring leads to a sauce with lumps.

“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.

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes