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Supreme Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, mushroom liquor, chicken stock, cream, lemon juice, salt, and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Supreme Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir to form a smooth paste; cook for one minute without browning.

  3. Gradually add the hot chicken stock while stirring briskly.

  4. Add the hot cream and continue stirring.

  5. Reduce the mushroom liquor to two tablespoons by simmering slowly, then add it to the sauce.

  6. Add the lemon juice and season with salt and pepper to taste.

  7. Whip the sauce until smooth and glossy.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Mushroom + chickentop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Butter
Forms the fat base that the flour is cooked into to make the roux.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter into a smooth paste.
Chicken stock
Provides the liquid that the roux thickens into a pourable sauce.
Hot cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier body to the finished sauce.
Mushroom liquor
Contributes concentrated mushroom flavour once reduced and stirred into the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the flour without browning. Cooking the butter and flour paste for about one minute cooks out the raw starch taste while keeping the roux pale. Browning would change the colour and flavour of the sauce, and adding liquid to an undercooked roux can leave lumps or a floury taste.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Mangofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, cream, flour, mushroom, chicken, pepper. 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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