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Brown Mushroom Sauce

A savory sauce made with mushrooms, stock, butter, flour, and aromatics, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Turnip and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,002 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Brown Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sauce

  1. Cut the mushrooms into small pieces.

  2. In a pan, fry the mushrooms and cloves in butter until browned.

  3. Add the flour and stir until it turns dark brown.

  4. Gradually add the stock while stirring.

Finish and strain

  1. Chop the mushrooms and stir them into the sauce.

  2. Simmer for 30 minutes and then strain through a sieve.

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. Turnip + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Clove + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Turnip + oniontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Clove + turniptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that fries the mushrooms and cooks the flour into a roux, carrying flavour and richness.
Flour
Thickens the sauce and, cooked until dark brown, adds colour and a toasted flavour.
Mushrooms
Provide the main earthy flavour and body of the sauce.
Stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, adding savoury depth.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour until dark brown. Flour must be cooked long enough to lose its raw taste and develop colour and nutty flavour, but stopped before it burns and turns bitter. Stirring constantly prevents scorching and lumps when the stock is added.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against turnip, carrot, onion, butter, flour, 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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