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Mushroom Sauce

A creamy mushroom sauce made with fresh mushrooms, cream, stock, and a brown roux, served with beefsteak or poultry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Peel and break the mushrooms into small pieces.

  2. Cook the mushrooms in hot water for five minutes, then drain.

Make the sauce

  1. Make a white sauce using the mushroom liquor and cream, then add the mushrooms and reheat.

  2. For the brown sauce, make a roux with butter and browned flour.

  3. Stir in brown stock, mushroom liquor, salt, and pepper; cook for ten minutes.

  4. Dilute the egg yolk with cream, add to the sauce, then add the mushrooms.

Finish and serve

  1. Cook for an additional ten minutes and serve with beefsteak or poultry.

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. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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 flavour and the bulk of the sauce's texture.
Butter
Forms the fat base of the roux, adding richness and a nutty flavour.
Browned flour
Thickens the sauce as the roux, and adds a deeper brown colour and toasted flavour.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the sauce.
Egg yolk
Thickens and enriches the sauce, giving it a fuller, velvety texture.
Brown stock
Supplies savoury depth and liquid body to the brown sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolk. Egg yolk proteins set when heated, so it should be diluted with cream and stirred into the sauce gradually, off the boil. This thickens smoothly; if the sauce is too hot, the yolk can scramble and turn grainy.

“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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