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Sauce

Velvet Sauce

A rich sauce made from butter, flour, stock, mushroom liquor, peppercorns, salt, and nutmeg.

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

Velvet Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir well.

Make the sauce

  1. Moisten with the stock.

  2. Add the mushroom liquor, peppercorns, salt, and nutmeg.

  3. Boil for 20 minutes, stirring continuously.

  4. Remove from heat and skim off any foam.

  5. Simmer very slowly for 1 hour.

  6. Strain the sauce.

  7. Adjust seasoning with more salt and pepper if needed.

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. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,988 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Veal + mushroomtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,446 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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
Enriches the roux and adds richness and a rounded flavour to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked with the butter.
Veal or chicken stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries its savoury flavour.
Mushroom liquor
Adds earthy mushroom flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter and then the stock. Cooking the flour in butter coats the starch granules so they disperse without lumps when the stock is added. Stirring continuously keeps the sauce smooth and prevents scorching on the base of the pan.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Thymefits about as well
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Parsleyfits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

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