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Sauce

White Mushroom Sauce

A creamy sauce made with white sauce and button mushrooms, seasoned with salt, mace, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and sauce are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,480 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

White Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Remove the stems from the mushrooms and clean them with a little salt and a cloth.

  2. Soak the mushrooms in cold, slightly salted water, then drain or dry them with a soft cloth.

Make the sauce

  1. Bring the white sauce to a boil and add the mushrooms.

  2. Simmer for 10 to 20 minutes until the mushrooms are tender.

  3. Season the sauce with salt, mace, and cayenne 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. Mushroom + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,480 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Mushroom + macetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Sauce + macetop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,217 recipes

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Button mushrooms
Provide the main body and earthy flavour of the sauce.
White sauce
Forms the creamy base that carries the mushrooms and seasonings.
Flour
Thickens the white sauce so it coats the mushrooms.
Butter
Adds richness and fat to the white sauce, softening its flavour.

The step that matters

Simmering the mushrooms. Simmering until the mushrooms are tender lets them release and absorb flavour into the sauce. Stopping too early leaves them firm, while overcooking can make them rubbery and watery.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Garlicfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, sauce. 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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