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Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made by stewing button mushrooms with veal gravy, milk, or cream, onion, butter, flour, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Select mushrooms that are dull pearl in color with pale pink undersides.

  2. Wash the mushrooms and remove the stems and outer skins.

  3. For enhanced flavor, salt a few mushrooms the night before to extract their juice.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the mushrooms slowly in veal gravy, milk, or cream.

  2. Add the onion and season with pepper, salt, and butter rolled in flour.

  3. If any mushrooms are poisonous, the onion will turn black; discard the 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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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 body and earthy flavor of the sauce as they soften and release their juices.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Rolled into the butter, it thickens the liquid into a smooth, cohesive sauce.
Veal gravy, milk, or cream
Supplies the liquid that cooks the mushrooms and forms the body of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stew the mushrooms slowly. Slow, gentle heat lets the mushrooms release their juices and soften evenly without toughening or scorching. Rapid boiling can make the sauce tough, uneven, or cause the flour-thickened base to clump.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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