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Beown Sauce

A brown mushroom sauce made with butter, flour, brown stock, mushrooms, and caramel for color.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Beown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Wash the mushrooms in cold water, trim the stalks, and peel them.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt 2 ounces of butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in 1½ ounces of flour to the melted butter, mixing into a smooth paste.

  3. Add 1 pint of brown stock and the mushrooms, stirring until the sauce boils and thickens.

  4. Reduce heat and let the sauce simmer gently for 10 minutes.

  5. Skim off any butter that rises to the top.

  6. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  7. If the sauce is not brown enough, stir in 1 teaspoon of caramel (burnt sugar).

  8. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve into a bowl, and it's ready to use.

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. Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + mushroomtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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

Brown stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries its savory flavor.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked into the melted butter as a roux.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and forms the roux with the flour.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavor and body to the sauce as they simmer in it.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter. The flour must be mixed into a smooth paste with the melted butter before liquid is added. Mixing thoroughly cooks the starch and prevents lumps when the stock goes in.

“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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