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Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from mushrooms, butter, flour, cream, and seasonings, served with white meats.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean and slice the mushrooms.

  2. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the mushrooms, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  2. Cook until the mushrooms release their liquid.

  3. Stir in the flour to thicken the sauce.

  4. Add enough cream to achieve a white sauce consistency.

  5. For a brown sauce, fry the mushrooms in butter until golden.

  6. Then stew the browned mushrooms in strong gravy.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce with chicken or other white meats, garnished 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour while the mushrooms cook.
Mushrooms
Provide the main body and earthy flavour of the sauce as they release their liquid.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and mushroom liquid.
Cream
Adds richness and smoothness, giving the white sauce its creamy texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the mushrooms and cream.

The step that matters

Adding the cream. Cream should be added gradually after the flour has thickened the mushroom liquid. Adding it too early or too fast can thin the sauce or cause it to split, so the consistency may be hard to correct once it has gone wrong.

Swap the mace

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

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

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