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Sauce

Mushroom Sauce

A creamy sauce made from mushrooms, butter, cream, and lemon juice, finished with white glaze or velouté.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Soak mushrooms in water and lemon juice to preserve color.

  2. Strain the mushrooms and dry them with a cloth.

  3. If mushrooms are large, cut them into smaller pieces and rub down the cuttings.

Make the sauce

  1. Simmer mushrooms in butter with mace, pepper, and salt for one hour.

  2. Prepare cream thickened with rice flour.

  3. Add the thickened cream to the mushrooms and stir until smooth.

  4. Finish with lemon juice and white glaze or velouté sauce.

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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Mushroom + ricetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,515 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

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

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.
Cream
Adds richness and moisture, forming the base of the sauce.
Rice flour
Thickens the cream so the sauce becomes smooth and coats the mushrooms.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor as the mushrooms simmer.
White glaze or velouté sauce
Adds body and a savory base to finish the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the thickened cream to the mushrooms and stir until smooth. Adding thickened cream too quickly or at too high a heat can cause lumps or curdling. Stirring steadily while combining keeps the starch dispersed and the sauce smooth.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Parsleyfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, pepper, cream, rice, flour, 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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