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French Mushroom Sauce

A creamy sauce made with fresh mushrooms, butter, flour, cream, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

French Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the mushrooms but do not peel them, then cut them into bits.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the mushrooms, butter, salt, and pepper. Cover the saucepan and cook over moderate heat for 20 minutes.

  2. Mix the flour and cream with some of the mushroom cooking water, then stir into the saucepan. Bring to a boil once more and serve.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 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 as they release their liquid while cooking.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when stirred into the hot cooking liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavor while helping soften the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Mixing the flour and cream before stirring in. Flour clumps if added directly to hot liquid. Mixing it first with cream and some cooking liquid lets it disperse evenly so the sauce thickens smoothly.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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