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Sauce

Brown Sauce

A savory mushroom brown sauce made with butter, flour, stock, and mushrooms, finished with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Brown Sauce

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 ↓

Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

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

  2. Wash the mushrooms, trim the stalks, and peel them.

  3. Stir the flour into the melted butter to form a smooth paste.

  4. Add the brown stock and mushrooms, stirring until the sauce boils and thickens.

  5. Reduce heat and let the sauce simmer gently for 10 minutes.

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

  7. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  8. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve into a bowl.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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

Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce when cooked with the melted butter.
Butter
Forms the fat base for the flour paste and adds richness to the sauce.
Brown stock
Provides the liquid and savoury flavour that the sauce is built on.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour to the sauce as they simmer in the stock.

The step that matters

Stir the flour into the melted butter to form a smooth paste. Cooking the flour in the butter before adding liquid lets its starch coat the grains and disperse evenly. Adding stock too quickly or without stirring can cause lumps that are hard to remove later.

“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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