Skip to main content
Sauce

Mushroom-Sauce for White Fowls of All Sorts

A creamy mushroom sauce seasoned with mace and lemon, served over white poultry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and 12,525 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Mushroom-Sauce for White Fowls of All Sorts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. Cut the mushrooms in half.

  2. In a stew pan, melt the butter and add the mushrooms, mace, and salt.

  3. Stew gently for 30 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the cream and beaten egg yolks, stirring continuously until it boils.

  2. Squeeze the juice of half a lemon into the sauce.

  3. Serve over your fowls or turkeys.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together4,633 recipes

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

  4. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together4,500 recipes

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

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together41,227 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh mushrooms
Provide the main body and savory flavor of the sauce as they soften and release their liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, body-giving texture to the sauce.
Egg yolks
Thicken the cream as they set with heat, giving the sauce a silky body.
Butter
Adds fat and rich flavor while helping the mushrooms cook gently in the pan.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and balances the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks thicken through gentle heat, but if the sauce boils too hard or too long after they go in, they can scramble and curdle. Stir constantly and keep the heat moderate as it comes up to a boil.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

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

  1. Nutmegbetter flavor fit
  2. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  3. Tarragonbetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, cream, egg, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes