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Supreme Sauce

A creamy mushroom sauce made with butter, flour, chicken stock, cream, lemon juice, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper 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 ↓

Supreme Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Mix in the flour smoothly.

  3. Add the chicken stock and mushrooms.

  4. Cook the sauce well, then add the cream.

  5. Do not let the sauce boil after adding the cream.

  6. Strain the sauce, add lemon juice, and season with salt and pepper to taste.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Chicken + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,172 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-butyl acetate (fruity, banana).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

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

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

  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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour while forming the base roux with the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce by forming a roux with the melted butter.
Chicken stock
Forms the liquid body of the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.
White button mushrooms
Add earthy flavour to the sauce as they cook in the stock.

The step that matters

Do not let the sauce boil after adding the cream. Boiling cream can cause it to separate and curdle, and it can break the emulsion, leaving the sauce grainy and thin rather than smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Mangofits less well

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