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Mushroom Sauce

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

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 ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a frying pan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the flour and stir until smooth and slightly browned, but do not burn.

  3. Pour in the soup stock and the liquid drained from the mushrooms, stirring carefully to avoid lumps.

  4. Add the salt and pepper, and cook for a few minutes.

  5. Stir in the mushrooms and simmer for an additional 5 minutes before serving hot.

  6. For a thicker sauce, mix in more flour wet with water.

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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 as it cooks and gives it body, especially when browned lightly first.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness and flavor to the sauce base.
Mushrooms
Provide the main earthy flavor and savory bulk of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter and liquid. Flour clumps when added to hot liquid without steady stirring. Cooking the flour in butter first coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly, and adding the liquid gradually while stirring keeps the sauce smooth.

“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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