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Mushroom Sauce for Beefsteak

A mushroom gravy made with canned mushrooms, butter, flour, and hot water, served over beefsteak.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter 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 ↓

Mushroom Sauce for Beefsteak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Drain the mushrooms and cut them into even sizes.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in the pan used for cooking the beefsteak.

  2. Add the mushrooms and stir until browned.

  3. Stir in the flour and brown it as well.

  4. Pour in the mushroom liquor; add hot water if needed to achieve the right gravy consistency.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the steak and serve immediately.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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
Provide the main savory flavor and, when browned, deeper meaty aroma and color.
Butter
Carries heat across the pan, adds richness, and helps the mushrooms and flour brown.
Flour
Thickens the gravy as its starch swells in the hot liquid, giving body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir in the flour and brown it as well. Cooking flour in the fat until it turns golden removes its raw taste and helps it thicken evenly. Adding liquid to flour that is not cooked well can leave lumps and a pasty flavor.

“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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