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Sauce

Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from fresh mushrooms, butter, cream, egg yolks, and lemon, served over fowls or toasted bread.

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. Clean and wash the mushrooms, then cut them in half.

Make the sauce

  1. In a stewpan, combine the mushrooms, salt, mace, and butter.

  2. Stew gently for 30 minutes.

  3. Add the cream and beaten egg yolks, stirring continuously until it boils.

  4. Squeeze in the lemon juice and serve over fowls or in a dish with buttered, toasted French bread.

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

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

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

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

  5. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Form the bulk of the sauce and release their liquid as they stew, adding savory flavor.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the mushrooms cook gently in fat.
Cream
Gives the sauce body and a smooth, rich texture.
Egg yolks
Thicken the cream as they heat, giving the sauce a silky consistency.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and mushrooms.

The step that matters

Adding the egg yolks. Egg yolks can curdle or scramble if the cream gets too hot too fast. Stirring continuously while bringing the mixture to a boil keeps the sauce smooth and evenly thickened.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, cream, egg, lemon. 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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