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Canned Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from canned mushrooms, butter, flour, stock, and lemon juice, finished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Canned Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and cook until smooth.

  3. Slowly pour in the liquid from the canned mushrooms and the brown stock.

  4. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  5. Stir until the mixture is perfectly smooth and thickened.

Add the mushrooms

  1. Add the mushrooms, cut in half, and cook just long enough to heat them thoroughly.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it cooks with the butter.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness to the sauce.
Brown stock
Provides the main liquid and savory body of the sauce.
Liquid from canned mushrooms
Adds mushroom flavor and extra liquid to the sauce.
Mushrooms
Supply the mushroom pieces and bulk in the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the flour into the sauce until perfectly smooth and thickened. Flour clumps if liquid is added too quickly or not stirred, leaving lumps. Stirring while the starch gelatinizes as the mixture heats lets it thicken evenly into a smooth sauce.

“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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