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Sauce

Mushroom Sauce, White

A creamy sauce made from young mushrooms, cream, salt, mace or nutmeg, flour, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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, White

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the mushrooms and remove the skins by rubbing them with salt.

Make the sauce

  1. Place the mushrooms in a saucepan with salt and cream.

  2. Add mace or nutmeg and thicken with flour and butter.

  3. Bring to a boil, stirring constantly to prevent curdling.

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. Cream + buttertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

  5. Cream + macetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,009 recipes

Flour and butter 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.
Cream
Supplies fat and richness, giving the sauce its smooth, silky body.
Flour
Thickens the cream into a sauce when cooked with butter.
Butter
Forms a roux with flour and adds richness to the sauce.

The step that matters

Bring to a boil while stirring constantly. Cream can curdle or scorch if it overheats unevenly on the base of the pan. Constant stirring keeps the heat even and the sauce smooth as the flour thickens it.

Swap the mace

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

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

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