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Mushroom Sauce

A creamy sauce made with young mushrooms, butter, flour, cream, salt, white pepper, and nutmeg.

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 the mushrooms

  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 rolled in flour.

  2. Simmer together, shaking or stirring frequently until it boils.

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

Serve

  1. Serve warm.

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 body and earthy flavour of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats with the butter.
Cream
Adds richness and body, and thickens as it boils.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour into the mushrooms. Flour needs to be dispersed and heated to thicken properly. Stirring or shaking often keeps it from clumping or scorching on the base of the pan while the mixture comes to the 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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