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Sauce

To Prepare Mushrooms Eor Roast Beef

A mushroom gravy made with onion, flour, water, canned mushrooms, and Worcestershire sauce, poured over roast beef.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,626 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

To Prepare Mushrooms Eor Roast Beef

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Remove the roast beef from the baking pan.

  2. In the same pan, cook the chopped onion in the fat until softened.

  3. Add flour and stir until combined, then gradually add water.

  4. Stir in the canned mushrooms and remove from heat.

  5. Add Worcestershire sauce and pour the mixture around the beef on the dish.

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. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Onion + flourtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together32,460 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Flour + saucetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,078 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Flour + mushroomtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Onion and sauce barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,474 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

Onion
Softens in the pan fat and builds a savory, aromatic base for the gravy.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth gravy as it cooks with the fat and water.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavor and body to the gravy.
Worcestershire sauce
Adds savory depth and a touch of acidity to the gravy.

The step that matters

Adding the water to the flour. Stirring the flour into the fat first and then adding liquid gradually keeps the mixture smooth. Dumping the liquid in at once can trap clumps of flour that stay raw and lumpy in the finished gravy.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, mushroom, sauce. 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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