Skip to main content
Sauce

A Very Fine Mushroom Sauce for Fowls, or Rabbits

A sauce made from young mushrooms, cream, butter, flour, nutmeg, mace, and salt, served over fowls or rabbits.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Nutmeg and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

A Very Fine Mushroom Sauce for Fowls, or Rabbits

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Wash and pick the mushrooms.

  2. Sprinkle with salt to remove the tender skin.

Make the sauce

  1. Place mushrooms in a saucepan with nutmeg, mace, cream, and butter mixed with flour.

  2. Boil and stir until cooked.

Serve

  1. Pour around the chickens or rabbits and garnish with lemon.

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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Nutmeg + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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 flavour of the sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and body, thickening the sauce as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat and a silky texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and cream into a smooth sauce.

The step that matters

Boil and stir until cooked. Flour mixed with butter must be stirred while the cream heats so it thickens evenly without lumps. Stirring keeps the starch dispersed, and the sauce thickens as the starch swells with heat.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

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

More mushroom sauce for chicken recipes

or Rabbit 5 See all 10 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes