Mushroom Stew

Mushroom stew is a food that can be crafted by combining a bowl with one of each type of mushroom. When eaten, each bowl of stew restores and 9.6 hunger saturation.

Crafting
Alternatively, the player can collect mushroom stew by using a bowl on a Mooshroom, akin to obtaining milk from a Cow while holding a bucket.

Advantages

 * If the player is near a swamp or mushroom biome, Mushroom Stew becomes a readily available food source that can be stockpiled and made on-demand.
 * Even if the player has only a few mushrooms, they can be planted and grown into Huge Mushrooms with bonemeal, yielding more individual mushrooms.
 * Mushroom Stew restores the same amount of food points as Steak and Cooked Porkchops while not being dependent on the presence of animals or requiring a furnace, fuel, and time to cook.
 * The bowl is returned to the player empty after the stew has been eaten, and can be re-used to craft more.

Disadvantages

 * Mushroom Stew does not restore as much saturation as cooked meats, so the player will have to eat slightly more frequently.
 * While the ingredients and bowls stack, the bowls of stew do not stack in the inventory.

History
Mushroom Stew became easier to obtain in Beta 1.6 when mushrooms were given the ability to slowly spread under certain space and light conditions. However, this ability was severely reduced in 1.8.

In Beta 1.8, Mushroom Stew (along with Milk) was excluded from the types of food items that could stack in the inventory. However, Mushroom Stew became much more readily available since the new swamp biomes contained vine-covered trees with several mushrooms growing underneath them. Bonemeal could also be used on either type of mushroom to grow Huge Mushrooms that dropped several more individual mushrooms when broken.

The first Beta 1.9 pre-release introduced more fungi sources with the mushroom biome, an island populated by Huge Mushrooms and Mooshrooms, strange red cows with red mushrooms growing on its back. A Mooshroom could be "milked" with a bowl to obtain Mushroom Stew or sheared, turning the Mooshroom into a normal cow and dropping red mushrooms.

Trivia

 * In the Minecraft code, Mushroom Stew is called Mushroom Soup.
 * If Mushroom Stew is inventory edited to be in a stack, eating it consumes the whole stack while only having the restorative effects of a single bowl. A stack can, however, be unstacked to get the full effect of each one.
 * In the eating animation implemented in 1.8, the particles produced by eating mushroom stew contain wooden chunks from the bowl as well, implying the player is eating the bowl.