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Canned Mushrooms Sauce

A sauce made from canned mushroom juice, water or broth, butter, flour, lemon juice, and mushrooms.

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 ↓

Canned Mushrooms Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine the juice from the canned mushrooms with boiling water or broth in a saucepan and bring to a boil.

  2. In a small bowl, mix the butter and flour to form a paste. Stir the paste into the boiling mixture to thicken.

  3. Squeeze in the juice of half a lemon and add the mushrooms. Boil for about five 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. 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 + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Flour + lemontop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together30,404 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

Butter and flour
Form a paste that thickens the liquid into a smooth sauce as it heats.
Mushroom juice
Provides the main savoury, mushroom-flavoured liquid base for the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the flour paste into the boiling liquid. Flour thickens sauces only when it is dispersed and heated. Adding it as a paste and stirring it into boiling liquid helps prevent lumps and lets the starch swell evenly into a smooth sauce.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Raisinfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, 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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