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Sauce

Brown Sauce

A creamy sauce made with brown stock, flour, butter, and mushrooms, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Brown Sauce

Why it works: Butter and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and 12,525 recipes mention both. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Brown Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Melt 2 oz. of butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Wash and prepare the mushrooms by cutting off the ends of the stalks and peeling them.

Make the sauce

  1. Stir in 2 oz. of flour with a wooden spoon to form a smooth paste.

  2. Add 1 pint of brown stock and the mushrooms, stirring until the sauce boils and thickens.

  3. Reduce heat and let the sauce simmer gently for 10 minutes.

  4. Skim off any butter that rises to the top.

  5. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the sauce through a fine sieve into a basin before serving.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together12,525 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + mushroomtop 18% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Flour and butter 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

Flour
Thickens the butter and stock into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Brown stock
Forms the liquid base that gives the sauce its savoury flavour.
Butter
Carries flavour and enriches the sauce, and is skimmed off at the end.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour to the sauce as they cook in the stock.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter to form a smooth paste. Cooking flour in melted butter coats the starch granules so they disperse evenly in the liquid. Adding the stock without a smooth roux can leave lumps that are hard to remove later.

“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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