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Sauce

Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from mushrooms, butter, flour, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 sauce

  1. In a pot, combine the chopped mushrooms with boiling water, 1 tablespoon of butter, salt, and pepper.

  2. Simmer gently for 10 minutes.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix 1 tablespoon of flour with 1 tablespoon of butter to form a paste.

  4. Stir the paste into the mushroom mixture to thicken.

  5. Add the juice of half a lemon and mix well.

Serve

  1. Serve with roast meats.

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. Mushroom + buttertop 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

Button mushrooms
Provide the main flavour and body of the sauce as they soften and release their juices.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid, giving it body.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the sauce and helps bind the flour paste.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the mushrooms and butter.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour and butter paste into the mushroom mixture. Flour thickens only when its starch is hydrated and heated, so the paste should be stirred in evenly and the sauce kept simmering briefly to avoid lumps and a raw floury taste.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, pepper, 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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