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Sauce

Fresh Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made with fresh mushrooms, veal stock, flour, butter, and cream, seasoned with salt, cayenne, kitchen bouquet, and lemon juice.

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

Fresh Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Pour cold water over the mushrooms to cleanse them, then drain the mushrooms immediately.

  2. Peel the mushrooms.

  3. Remove and scrape the stems.

  4. Sauté the mushrooms in a little butter until tender.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan.

  2. Add flour and cook until very smooth.

  3. Add the veal stock and stir continuously until thickened.

  4. Season with salt, cayenne, kitchen bouquet, and lemon juice.

  5. Add the cut-up mushrooms and cream.

  6. Heat thoroughly before serving.

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. Pepper + lemontop 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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Fresh mushrooms
Provide the main body and savory flavor of the sauce.
Veal stock
Forms the liquid base that gives the sauce its savory depth.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked with butter.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavor, and cooks the flour into a roux.
Cream
Adds richness and a softer, smoother mouthfeel to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour into the butter until very smooth. If the flour is not cooked well with the butter, it can leave a raw starchy taste and lumps. Stirring the stock in steadily keeps the sauce smooth as it thickens.

“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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