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Sauce

Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made by sautéing mushrooms, thickening with flour, adding soup, seasoning, and finishing with egg yolk, sour cream, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Fry the finely chopped mushrooms in butter until tender.

  2. Sprinkle with flour and gradually add the meat or bone soup, stirring to combine.

  3. Season with coarse sea salt and black pepper, then bring to a boil.

Finish and serve

  1. In a separate bowl, mix the egg yolks with sour cream.

  2. Pour the egg yolk mixture over the mushrooms and heat gently.

  3. Finish with a little lemon juice 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

Mushrooms
Provide the main body and earthy flavor of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the soup into a smooth, cohesive sauce as it cooks.
Egg yolks
Enrich the sauce and add thickness and a silky texture when gently heated.
Sour cream
Adds creaminess and a tangy richness that balances the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich, creamy flavors.

The step that matters

Pour the egg yolk mixture over the mushrooms and heat gently.. Egg yolks thicken by coagulating under gentle heat. If the sauce gets too hot or boils after adding them, the yolks can scramble and turn grainy, so keep the heat low and stir.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Coconutfits about as well
  3. Avocadofits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, flour, egg, cream, meat, pepper. 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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