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Brown Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made with butter, flour, stock, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, and canned mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Brown Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

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

  2. Stir in the flour and cook until it turns a nice brown color.

  3. Add the soup stock or water and stir until it boils.

  4. Mix in the salt, pepper, and Worcestershire sauce.

  5. Finally, add the canned mushrooms and heat through before serving.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  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

Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter and liquid, giving it body.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness and flavor to the sauce.
Soup stock
Forms the liquid base that the flour thickens into a sauce.
Canned mushrooms
Supply the mushroom flavor and the main savory character of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Cooking the flour until it turns brown develops nutty, toasted flavor and color. Stopping too early leaves a raw, pasty taste, while cooking too long can scorch it and make the sauce bitter.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Jalapenofits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

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