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Mushroom Sauce

A creamy sauce made with mushrooms, butter, cream, and spices.

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. Preserve mushrooms' color by soaking them in water and lemon juice.

  2. Strain and dry the mushrooms with a cloth.

  3. Cut larger mushrooms and rub down the cuttings.

Make the sauce

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

  2. Thicken cream with rice flour and add to the mushrooms.

  3. Stir until the sauce is smooth, then add lemon juice and white glaze.

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
Form the body of the sauce and release flavor as they simmer in butter.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying the mace and pepper flavors through the mushrooms.
Cream
Provides moisture and a smooth, rich texture for the sauce.
Rice flour
Thickens the cream so the sauce coats the mushrooms.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and helps keep the mushrooms pale.

The step that matters

Stir until the sauce is smooth. Flour mixed into cream can form lumps if not stirred well, and the starch must be fully dispersed to thicken evenly as the sauce heats.

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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