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White Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from white mushrooms, butter, salt, pepper, lemon juice, white sauce, and broth or milk, served over white meat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

White Mushroom Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Cut out the dark part and remove the stalk from the mushrooms.

  2. Wash the mushrooms in several waters.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, melt a little butter and add the mushrooms, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  2. Sauté for a few minutes.

  3. Add the white sauce and broth, milk, or water. Boil.

  4. Serve under any white meat.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

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

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

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

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

  5. Mushroom + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Small white mushrooms
Provide the main body and savoury flavour of the sauce once cooked down.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps sauté the mushrooms without sticking.
Juice of lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the mushroom flavour and balances the richness.
White sauce
Forms the creamy base that gives the sauce its body and thickness.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Mangofits about as well
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Coconutfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, pepper, sauce, milk. 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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