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Sauce

Cream Sauce with Mushrooms

A creamy sauce flavored with mushrooms, made by whisking butter and flour, adding cream, seasoning, and cooking mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom 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 ↓

Cream Sauce with Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a hot saucepan, stir together the butter and flour until smooth.

  2. Gradually add the sweet cream while stirring continuously.

  3. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Add the mushrooms

  1. Once thickened, add the chopped mushrooms.

  2. If using canned mushrooms, heat them through without boiling.

  3. If using fresh mushrooms, boil for 10 minutes.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 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. Pepper + mushroomtop 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. Cream + mushroomtop 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

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries flavor through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by its starch as it cooks with the liquid.
Sweet cream
Forms the liquid base, adding body and a smooth, rich texture.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavor and a tender, meaty texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the cream gradually while stirring. Flour starch clumps when liquid is poured in too fast. Adding the cream slowly while stirring keeps the mixture smooth so the starch thickens evenly.

“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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