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Brown Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made with mushrooms, stock, butter, flour, and aromatics, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Brown Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and brown the mushrooms

  1. Cut the mushrooms into small pieces.

  2. In a pan, melt the butter and fry the mushrooms with the cloves until browned.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the flour and stir until it turns dark brown.

  2. Gradually add the stock while stirring.

  3. Chop the mushrooms and stir them into the sauce.

  4. Simmer for 30 minutes and then strain through a sieve.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + turniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Provide the main earthy flavor and body of the sauce, and brown in the butter.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the mushrooms and flour brown.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid, and darkens for color and nutty flavor.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries its savory flavor.

The step that matters

Adding the stock gradually while stirring. Flour starch clumps when hit with liquid all at once. Adding stock slowly and stirring disperses the starch granules evenly, so the sauce thickens smoothly without lumps.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (turnip, carrot, onion, butter, flour, mushroom):

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, onion, butter, flour, mushroom. 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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