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Sauce

Mushroom Sauce

A creamy sauce made with young mushrooms, cream, salt, mace, nutmeg, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Clean the mushrooms and remove the skin by rubbing them with salt.

  2. Place the mushrooms in a saucepan with salt, cream, mace, and nutmeg.

  3. Thicken the mixture with butter and flour.

  4. Let it boil while stirring continuously to prevent curdling.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce with fowls or rabbits.

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. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

  3. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Young mushrooms
Provide the main flavour and body of the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the sauce.
Butter
Combines with flour to thicken the sauce and add richness.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and liquid.

The step that matters

Keep stirring while the sauce boils. Cream can curdle or separate when it boils, especially in a thickened sauce. Constant stirring spreads heat evenly and keeps the sauce smooth.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, cream, nutmeg, 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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