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Mushroom Sauce

A sauce of mushrooms in veal gravy, seasoned with salt, pepper, mace, optional lemon peel, thickened with flour, finished with egg yolk and optional cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon 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 ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the mushrooms gently in the white veal gravy.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, mace, and lemon peel if desired.

  3. Thicken the sauce with flour.

Finish and serve

  1. Stir in the egg yolk just before serving.

  2. Add cream if preferred.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Mushroom + vealtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,446 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Young button mushrooms
Provide earthy flavour and tender texture after gentle stewing.
White veal gravy
Savoury liquid base that carries the flavour through the whole sauce.
Flour
Starch that thickens the gravy into a smooth, lightly body sauce as it heats.
Egg yolk
Adds richness and gentle thickening when stirred in at the end.

The step that matters

Stirring in the egg yolk. Egg yolk proteins set when heated, so if the sauce boils after the yolk goes in, it can curdle or scramble. Stir it in just before serving, off the heat or at low heat, to keep the sauce smooth and glossy.

“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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