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Fresh Mushroom Sauce for Steak

A sauce made from fresh mushrooms, butter, flour, stock or cream, seasoned with salt and pepper, served over steak.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Fresh Mushroom Sauce for Steak

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash and peel the mushrooms.

Make the sauce

  1. In a porcelain-lined or granite saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the mushrooms and cook for 15 minutes, stirring constantly and chopping with a spoon.

  3. Sprinkle the flour over the mushrooms and mix well.

  4. Add the stock or cream, and season with salt and pepper.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over and around the steak.

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 + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  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 + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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
Release moisture and savory flavor as they cook down into the sauce.
Butter
Carries flavor and adds richness while cooking the mushrooms.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the mushroom juices and liquid.
Stock or cream
Supplies the liquid that loosens the thickened base into a pourable sauce.

The step that matters

Sprinkle the flour over the mushrooms and mix well. Flour needs to be evenly distributed over the mushrooms before liquid is added, otherwise it clumps and the sauce becomes lumpy instead of smooth.

“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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