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Sauce

White Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from button mushrooms simmered in béchamel or white sauce, seasoned with salt, mace, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,580 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

White Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the stems from the mushrooms and clean them with a little salt and a soft cloth.

  2. Soak the mushrooms in cold, slightly salted water, then drain and dry them.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, bring the béchamel or white sauce to a boil.

  2. Add the mushrooms to the boiling sauce and simmer for 10 to 20 minutes until tender.

  3. Season the sauce with salt, mace, and cayenne to taste before serving.

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

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

  2. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Mushroom + macetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Small button mushrooms
Provide the main body and earthy flavour of the sauce, softening as they simmer.
Béchamel or white sauce
Forms the creamy base that carries the mushrooms and thickens the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and flavour to the white sauce base.

The step that matters

Simmering the mushrooms in the boiling sauce. Simmering gently until tender lets the mushrooms release flavour into the sauce and softens them evenly. A hard boil can toughen mushrooms and break the sauce, so keep it at a gentle simmer and check for tenderness.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

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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