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Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from mushrooms, butter, flour, and soup stock, seasoned with pepper, sea salt, and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and chop the mushrooms.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and stir until combined.

  3. Gradually add the soup stock, stirring constantly until thick and smooth.

  4. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  5. Simmer for 10 minutes.

  6. If desired, add a little lemon juice before serving.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (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
Provides fat and rich flavor, and forms the base that the flour cooks into.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid.
Soup stock
Forms the liquid body of the sauce and carries its savory flavor.
Mushrooms
Add earthy, savory flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add the soup stock while stirring constantly. Flour mixed into hot butter clumps if the liquid is added too fast. Adding the stock slowly while stirring disperses the starch evenly, so it swells smoothly as it heats and the sauce thickens without lumps.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

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