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Sauce

Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from sautéed mushrooms, barley flour, egg, and lemon juice.

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

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the mushrooms

  1. Heat the sliced mushrooms in a pan.

  2. Sprinkle in the barley flour and stir to thicken.

  3. Season with salt, pepper, and garlic if using.

Add the egg and lemon

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the egg.

  2. Pour the mushroom mixture into the bowl with the egg, stirring as you pour.

  3. Add the lemon juice and mix well.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Mushroom + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,700 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  4. Mushroom + barleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together110 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  5. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

What each ingredient does

French mushrooms
Provide the main body and savory flavor of the sauce.
Barley flour
Starch thickens the sauce as it heats and stirs.
Egg
Adds richness and helps bind the sauce when mixed in.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mushroom flavor.

The step that matters

Pour the mushroom mixture into the beaten egg while stirring. Adding hot liquid to egg gradually while stirring, called tempering, raises the egg's temperature slowly. Pouring it in all at once or without stirring can cause the egg to scramble into lumps instead of blending smoothly into the sauce.

Swap the clove

The recipe marks clove as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, barley, flour, pepper, garlic, egg, lemon):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, barley, flour, pepper, garlic, egg, lemon. 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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