Skip to main content
Sauce

Mushroom Sauce

A savory sauce made with butter, flour, stock, canned mushrooms, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and mushroom 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

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Heat the butter and drippings until brown.

  2. Add flour and stir until smooth.

Make the sauce

  1. Gradually add the stock, stirring constantly.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Add the mushrooms and cook for 5 minutes.

  4. Stir in Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and flour 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and browning gives the sauce a deeper, nutty flavor.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot butter and stock.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries its savory flavor.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavor and a tender, meaty texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the stock gradually. Flour must be whisked into the hot fat and liquid slowly and constantly so its starch disperses evenly. Adding the stock all at once can form lumps that are hard to smooth out.

“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.

More mushroom sauce recipes

Brown 64White 28for Chicken 10Italian 8for Chicken or Rabbit 5for Poultry 5 See all 226 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes