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Mushroom Brown Sauce

A savory sauce made from mushrooms, butter, flour, liquor, water, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and sherry or Madeira.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and sherry are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,176 recipes. Both carry 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol, which smells smoky, clove. The science ↓

Mushroom Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter and flour together over medium heat until they begin to brown.

  2. Gradually stir in the liquor from the can, adding water as needed to achieve the desired sauce consistency.

  3. Add the mushrooms and season the sauce with salt, pepper, and nutmeg.

  4. Once the mushrooms are hot, stir in the sherry or Madeira.

Serve

  1. Serve the mushrooms as a vegetable, optionally over toast, or pour over broiled beefsteak, chicken, or roasted tenderloin.

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 + sherrytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,176 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter and flour
Cooked together into a roux, they thicken the sauce and add a toasty flavour as they brown.
Mushroom liquor
Its savoury juices form the liquid base of the sauce and carry the mushroom flavour.
Sherry or madeira
Adds a fortified wine sweetness and depth of flavour to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the butter and flour. The roux must be cooked long enough to lose its raw starch taste, but stopped once it starts to brown. Over-browning gives a bitter flavour and weakens thickening, while under-cooking leaves a pasty taste.

Swap the nutmeg

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits about as well
  3. Marjoramfits about as well
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, flour, pepper, sherry. 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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