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Sauce

Pickled Mushrooms

A creamy mushroom sauce made by simmering mushrooms in milk, butter, flour, pepper, salt, and cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Milk and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 81,283 recipes. Both carry (z)-4-heptenal, which smells biscuit, cream. The science ↓

Pickled Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Pick and wash the mushrooms.

  2. Put them in a saucepan with the milk and stew gently for 30 minutes.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix the butter and flour together.

  2. Stir the butter and flour mixture into the mushrooms, adding pepper and salt.

  3. Simmer for 10 minutes.

  4. Add the cream and strain into a sauce-tureen.

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. Milk + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  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. Mushroom + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Form the body of the sauce and release flavourful liquid as they stew.
Milk
Forms the liquid base of the sauce and carries the mushroom flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and combines with flour to thicken the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter and liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture at the end.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour into the mushrooms. Flour clumps if added raw to hot liquid. Mixing it with butter first coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly, then cooking gelatinises the starch and thickens the sauce smoothly.

“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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