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White Sauce

A creamy mushroom white sauce made with butter, flour, stock, mushrooms, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour with a wooden spoon until combined.

  3. Add the white stock and stir until it boils.

  4. Wash and peel the mushrooms, then add them to the sauce.

  5. Allow the sauce to boil again, then reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes with the lid half on.

  6. Skim off any butter that rises to the surface.

Strain and finish

  1. Strain the sauce through a fine cloth into another saucepan.

  2. Heat the strained sauce until it boils, then stir in the cream.

  3. Pour the sauce into a bowl.

  4. Stir while it cools.

  5. It is now ready to use.

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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
Enriches the sauce with fat and adds a rich, smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells in the hot liquid, giving body.
White stock
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, velvety texture to the finished sauce.
Mushrooms
Contribute savoury, earthy flavour as they simmer in the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the flour into the butter and keep stirring as the stock is added. Flour must be cooked briefly in the fat and whisked into the liquid to avoid lumps. Stirring as the stock goes in spreads the starch evenly so it thickens smoothly instead of clumping.

“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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