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Sauce

Mushroom Sauce, White

A creamy white sauce flavored with button mushrooms, salt, pepper, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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, White

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Clean, peel, and remove the stalks from the mushrooms.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the mushrooms in the White Sauce until soft.

  2. Remove the mushrooms, pound them in a mortar, and rub through a sieve.

  3. Combine the mushroom puree with enough White Sauce to achieve a thick cream consistency.

  4. Season with coarse sea salt, black pepper, and lemon juice.

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

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

  3. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

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

  4. Mushroom + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,480 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Sauce + peppertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Sauce and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 15,303 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

Button mushrooms
Provide the main flavour and, once pureed, the body of the sauce.
White sauce
Softens the mushrooms as they stew and thins the puree into a thick cream.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mushroom flavour and balances the richness of the sauce.

The step that matters

Rub the mushrooms through a sieve. Pounding and sieving breaks the cooked mushrooms into a smooth puree. Leftover lumps or fibres leave the sauce gritty, so the puree should be pushed through fully before it is thinned with White Sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, sauce, pepper):

  1. Limefits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Plumfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, sauce, 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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