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Sauce

White Mushroom Sauce

A creamy sauce made with mushrooms, rice flour, stock, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

White Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Stir in the rizine (rice flour) until combined.

  3. Add the stock and bring to a boil.

  4. Once boiling, add the mushrooms and simmer for 15 minutes, skimming off any butter that rises.

  5. Season with cayenne and coarse sea salt, then add the lemon juice.

  6. Boil for a few more minutes 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. 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. Rice + mushroomtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,515 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

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

  5. Rice + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,379 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rizine or rice flour
Thickens the stock and butter into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Button mushrooms
Provide the main flavour and body of the sauce as they simmer.
Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour, with fat rising to the surface to be skimmed.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the rich sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring in the rice flour after the butter. Flour needs to be cooked briefly in the fat before liquid is added, so it dissolves smoothly and thickens evenly instead of forming lumps.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Coconutfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Cherryfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, mushroom, pepper, butter. 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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