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Mushroom Sauce

A creamy sauce made with mushrooms, milk, butter, corn flour, salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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. Clean, peel, and remove the stalks from the mushrooms.

  2. Stew the mushrooms in milk until soft.

  3. Pound the mushrooms in a mortar and rub through a wire sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan.

  2. Stir in the corn flour until smooth.

  3. Add the milk with the mushrooms and the pounded mushrooms.

  4. Stir the mixture over heat until it boils.

  5. Cook for five minutes.

  6. Add salt, pepper, and nutmeg to taste.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: hexanal (green, grassy).

  5. Corn + nutmegtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together563 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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, once pounded and sieved, body to the sauce.
Corn flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth sauce as it heats and boils.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the flour blend smoothly.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and softens the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Stir the flour into the butter until smooth, then add the liquid gradually. Starch granules clump if hot liquid meets them unevenly. Cooking the flour briefly in fat and stirring while the mixture comes to the boil keeps the sauce smooth and fully thickened.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (corn, flour, butter, milk, mushroom, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, flour, butter, milk, mushroom, nutmeg. 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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