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Sauce

Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from peeled mushrooms, butter, water, lemon juice, flour, and cream, simmered and thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Peel the mushrooms and soak them in water and lemon juice to keep them white.

  2. Strain the mushrooms.

Make the sauce

  1. Place them in a stewpan with butter, salt, pepper, and the juice of half a lemon.

  2. Stew for 30 minutes.

  3. Add flour and cream (or white/brown sauce) and boil for 5 minutes.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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
Form the body of the sauce and release their own liquid and flavour as they stew.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour and giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it boils with the cream, giving it body.
Cream
Adds moisture, richness and a smooth texture to the finished sauce.
Lemon juice
Acidity that helps keep the mushrooms pale during soaking and brightens the sauce.

The step that matters

Add flour and cream, then boil for 5 minutes. Flour needs sustained heat in liquid to swell and thicken the sauce fully. Boiling too briefly leaves a thin, starchy-tasting sauce, while letting cream boil too hard for too long can cause it to separate or reduce unevenly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, pepper, flour, cream. 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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