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Another Mushroom-Sauce

A creamy mushroom sauce served over toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Another Mushroom-Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and wash the mushrooms, then cut them in half.

  2. Place the mushrooms in a stew-pan with salt, mace, and butter.

Make the sauce

  1. Stew gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Add cream and beaten egg yolks, then stir until the mixture boils.

  3. Squeeze in the juice of half a lemon.

Serve

  1. Dip a slice of toasted bread in boiling water.

  2. Serve the sauce over the 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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  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 + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

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

  5. Egg + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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 own liquid and savory flavor as they stew.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor while the mushrooms cook gently.
Cream
Adds richness and body, thickening the sauce as it heats.
Egg yolks
Thicken the cream-based sauce and add richness as the mixture heats.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the rich cream and mushroom flavors.

The step that matters

Stir until the mixture boils. Egg yolks thicken by gentle heat and can curdle or scramble if overheated, so the cream and yolk mixture should be stirred constantly and brought only to the point of boiling.

Swap the mace

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

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

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