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Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from mushrooms simmered in water or stock, seasoned with salt, pepper, butter, and thickened with a roux, finished with 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. Prepare the mushrooms by cutting off the stalks and halving or quartering large ones.

  2. Place the mushrooms in a pot and cover with boiling water or stock.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and a little butter.

Cook and finish

  1. Boil the mushrooms until tender.

  2. Thicken the gravy with a roux made from butter and flour.

  3. Add a few drops of lemon juice and pour over the meat.

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

Mushrooms
Form the body of the sauce and release savoury flavour as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and, with flour, forms the roux that thickens the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the gravy when cooked with butter into a roux.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich mushroom and meat flavours.

The step that matters

Thicken the gravy with the roux. Flour must be cooked in fat before liquid is added. Cooking the butter and flour together removes raw starch taste and lets the starch swell smoothly, so the gravy thickens without lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

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

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