Skip to main content
Sauce

Mushroom Sauce

A creamy sauce made with mushrooms, butter, flour, and egg yolk, finished with lemon juice.

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

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

Make the base

  1. Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a pan.

  2. Add the flour and cook until smooth and brown.

  3. Pour in the mushroom liquor and simmer for 5 minutes.

Add the flavourings

  1. Add the cooked mushrooms and season with salt and pepper.

  2. Stir in the lemon juice and simmer again.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the beaten egg yolk and the remaining tablespoon of butter.

  2. Beat until smooth and creamy.

  3. Serve.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 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

Butter
Adds richness and fat, and forms the base of the roux with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked in butter to form a roux.
Mushrooms
Provide the main earthy flavour and a soft, meaty texture.
Mushroom liquor
Supplies concentrated mushroom flavour and the liquid that makes up the sauce.
Egg yolk
Thickens and enriches the sauce, giving it a smooth, creamy body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and mushroom flavours.

The step that matters

Adding the beaten egg yolk. Egg yolk thickens by setting with gentle heat. If the sauce is too hot when it goes in, the yolk can scramble and turn grainy. Add it gently over low heat and beat until smooth and creamy.

“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.

More mushroom sauce recipes

Brown 64White 28for Chicken 10Italian 8for Chicken or Rabbit 5for Poultry 5 See all 226 →

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