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Mushroom Brown Sauce

A sauce made from mushrooms, brown gravy, lemon, butter, and flour.

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 ↓

Mushroom Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pare and chop the mushrooms, removing the roots.

  2. Wash them well and cut them in halves.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the mushrooms, brown gravy, and lemon peel.

  2. Season with salt and pepper.

  3. Cook gently for 30 minutes.

  4. If the liquid evaporates too much, add more gravy and a small piece of butter rolled in flour.

  5. Remove the lemon peel and add the juice of half a lemon.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Mushrooms
Provide the main body and earthy flavour of the sauce as they soften and release their liquid.
Brown gravy
Supplies the liquid and savoury base that the mushrooms cook in.
Butter
Rolled in flour, it thickens the sauce and adds richness when more liquid is added.
Flour
Combined with butter, it acts as a thickener that gives the sauce body.

The step that matters

Adding butter rolled in flour. Adding flour-coated butter to a sauce that has reduced too far helps thicken it smoothly. Adding it lumpy or too quickly can leave clumps, so it should be stirred in gradually.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, 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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