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White Sauce

A creamy mushroom sauce made with butter, flour, white stock, cream, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom 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 ↓

White Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Stir in the flour with a wooden spoon until combined.

  3. Add the white stock and stir until it boils.

  4. Clean and peel the mushrooms, then add them to the sauce.

  5. Allow the sauce to boil again, then reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes with the lid half on.

  6. Skim off any butter that rises to the surface.

  7. Strain the sauce through a cloth into another saucepan.

Finish and serve

  1. Heat the strained sauce and stir until it boils, then add the cream and lemon juice.

  2. Let the sauce boil for 3 to 5 minutes.

  3. Pour into a basin and stir while it cools; it is then ready for use.

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Mushroom + creamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,500 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour, and is skimmed off during simmering.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce by swelling with heat.
White stock
Forms the liquid base of the sauce.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour as they simmer in the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky body to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Add the flour and stir until combined before adding stock. Flour mixed into hot butter cooks into a roux; stirring it smooth prevents lumps, and the starch thickens the sauce as it boils.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, mushroom, 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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