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Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from sautéed mushrooms simmered in water, thickened with butter and flour, finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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. Wipe and cut the mushrooms into small pieces.

  2. Put the mushrooms into a cup of boiling water with 1 tablespoon of butter, salt, and pepper.

  3. Let simmer for 10 minutes.

Thicken and finish

  1. In a separate bowl, mix 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 tablespoon of flour to thicken the sauce.

  2. Add the thickening mixture to the mushrooms and stir well.

  3. Add the juice of half a lemon and mix.

  4. Serve the sauce with meats.

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

Button mushrooms
Provide the main flavour and body of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and liquid into a smooth, body-giving sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and a rounded, savoury flavour to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mushroom flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and butter mixture. Flour needs to be cooked in fat and stirred into hot liquid to thicken smoothly. Adding it all at once or unevenly can form lumps, so stir well as it is added.

Swap the lemon

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