Skip to main content
Sauce

Mushroom Sauce for Fowls, &C

A mushroom sauce for fowls made with fresh mushrooms, butter, lemon, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 27,047 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mushroom Sauce for Fowls, &C

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a stewpan, combine the mushrooms, butter, salt, and lemon juice.

  2. Cover and cook over moderate heat for 10 minutes until the liquid is extracted.

  3. Thicken the sauce with a mixture of flour and water.

  4. Season with Cayenne pepper and add a little soy sauce for color.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  3. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together13,580 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Butter and flour share little aroma chemistry, yet 124,287 recipes mention both: they likely 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
Release their liquid, which forms the base of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a smooth, cohesive sauce when mixed with water.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mushroom flavor.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with a mixture of flour and water. Flour must be mixed smoothly with cold water before adding, because dry flour dropped into hot liquid clumps. Starch then thickens the sauce as it heats, so it should be stirred in and simmered briefly.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

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

  1. Avocadoabout as good a flavor fit
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Limeabout as good a flavor fit
  4. Plumabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, butter, flour, pepper, sauce. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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.

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes