Skip to main content
Sauce

White Sauce with Mushrooms

A creamy white sauce flavored with mushrooms, made with butter, flour, stock, cream, and lemon.

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

White Sauce with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and mix well.

  3. Stir in the white stock and bring to a boil.

  4. Add the mushrooms and let simmer for 20 minutes.

  5. Partially cover the pan to allow butter to rise and skim it off.

  6. Strain the mixture into another saucepan.

Finish

  1. Add the cream and lemon juice, then bring to a boil while stirring.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

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

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

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

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 sauce with fat and flavour as it melts into the roux.
Flour
Thickens the stock with the butter, giving the sauce body.
White stock
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into the sauce.
Mushrooms
Release earthy flavour into the stock during simmering.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy sauce.

The step that matters

Skimming the butter off the surface. Butter floats on the simmering liquid and can make the sauce greasy. Partially covering the pan lets it rise so it can be skimmed off cleanly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes