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Cream Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from sautéed mushrooms, butter, cream, and flour, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter 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 ↓

Cream Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Clean the mushrooms and sprinkle with salt.

  2. Let them sit for at least 1 hour.

  3. Quarter the mushrooms and place them in a saucepan with the butter.

Make the sauce

  1. Cover tightly.

  2. Cook on medium heat for about 10 minutes until they boil in the butter and their own juices.

  3. Add the cream and bring to a boil.

  4. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  5. Stir in flour until the sauce thickens to the consistency of cream.

  6. Serve over broiled steak or toast.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

Mushrooms
Release their own juices during covered cooking, which build the body and flavor of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, helping the mushrooms brown and carry flavor.
Rich cream
Provides fat and moisture that give the sauce a smooth, creamy texture.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by swelling in the hot liquid as it cooks.

The step that matters

Stir in flour until the sauce thickens. Flour must be stirred in evenly and cooked in the hot liquid; added in clumps or too quickly it forms lumps, and it thickens only as the starch swells with heat.

“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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