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Mushroom Sauce for Boiled Turkey

A mushroom sauce made with button mushrooms, butter, salt, sugar, and white sauce, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Mushroom Sauce for Boiled Turkey

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Remove the skins from the mushrooms and cut off the stems.

Make the sauce

  1. Chop the mushrooms and place them in a saucepan with butter, salt, sugar, and white sauce.

  2. Simmer for five minutes.

  3. Rub the mixture through a coarse strainer.

Serve

  1. Serve very hot.

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

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

  2. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Mushroom + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,480 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,338 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

Button mushrooms
Provide the main flavor and body of the sauce once chopped and simmered.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
White sauce
Forms the creamy base that thickens and binds the mushroom mixture.

The step that matters

Rub the mixture through a coarse strainer. Pressing the cooked mushrooms through the strainer breaks down their fibres and smooths the sauce; skipping or rushing this leaves it lumpy and stringy.

“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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