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Mushroom Sauce

A creamy mushroom sauce made with young mushrooms, butter, flour, and cream, served with white meats.

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. Wash and pick the mushrooms, rubbing them with salt to remove loose skin.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine mushrooms, salt, white pepper, nutmeg, and butter mixed with enough flour to thicken.

  2. Simmer while frequently shaking or stirring until it boils.

  3. Add cream and stir until it boils and thickens.

Serve

  1. Serve with white meats like boiled fowl 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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. White pepper + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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.
Butter
Carries flavour and, mixed with flour, helps thicken the sauce.
Flour, arrow-root, or potato starch
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it a smooth, coating body.
Cream
Adds richness and a silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Add cream and stir until it boils and thickens. Cream can split or curdle if it boils too hard or too long at high heat. Stirring keeps it evenly mixed, while the starch thickens the sauce as it comes to a boil.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, nutmeg, butter, flour, cream. 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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