Skip to main content
Sauce

Mushroom Sauce

A creamy sauce made from stewed mushrooms, butter, cream, and corn flour, seasoned with nutmeg and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Stew the mushrooms in enough water to cover them until tender.

  2. Drain the mushrooms and add the cream, butter, and seasoning.

Thicken and serve

  1. Stew over medium heat until it begins to thicken.

  2. Add corn flour mixed with a little cold milk, then boil briefly.

  3. Serve in a sauceboat with boiled poultry or game.

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

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

  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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Corn + milktop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,955 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

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

What each ingredient does

Young mushrooms
Provide the main flavour and body of the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the sauce.
Melted butter
Adds fat for a rich mouthfeel and carries the mushroom flavour.
Corn flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it body.

The step that matters

Adding the corn flour. Corn flour must be mixed smoothly with cold milk before it goes in, otherwise it clumps. Starch thickens when heated in liquid, so the sauce should be stirred while it thickens and boiled briefly to cook out the raw starch taste.

“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.

More mushroom sauce recipes

Brown 64White 28for Chicken 10Italian 8for Chicken or Rabbit 5for Poultry 5 See all 226 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes