Name: Mushroom Sauce
Ingredients: 1 pint small button mushrooms; 1 onion; 2 tablespoons butter; 1 cup veal gravy or milk or cream; salt to taste; pepper to taste; 2 tablespoons flour

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 ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Wash the mushrooms and remove the stems and outer skins.
Select mushrooms that are dull pearl in color with pale pink undersides.

Make the sauce

Stew the mushrooms slowly in veal gravy, milk, or cream.
Add the chopped onion and season with salt, pepper, and butter rolled in flour.
For better flavor, salt the mushrooms the night before to extract their juice.

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.

Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together10,626 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together68,474 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together124,287 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

Mushrooms: Provide the main body and earthy flavor of the sauce.
Butter: Adds richness and fat, and with flour helps thicken the sauce.
Flour: Thickens the sauce when rolled into the butter and stirred in.
Veal gravy, milk, or cream: Forms the liquid base that gives the sauce its body and smoothness.

Swap the onion

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

Shallotfits better
Capsicumfits better
Spinachfits better
Onionthe original

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