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Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from mushrooms, butter, water, pepper, salt, thickened with butter and flour.

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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the stems from the mushrooms and peel them.

  2. Break the mushrooms into small pieces and place them in a saucepan with the butter, pepper, and a good sprinkling of salt.

Make the sauce

  1. Cook over medium heat for a few minutes.

  2. Add the water and simmer gently for about 30 minutes.

  3. To thicken the sauce, mix a little butter and flour together, then add to the sauce and cook for an additional 5 minutes.

  4. Serve very hot.

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. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

  3. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Mushroom + flourtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,253 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 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
Form the body of the sauce, releasing moisture and flavour as they cook down.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour while the mushrooms cook first.
Butter and flour
Flour mixed with butter thickens the liquid into a smooth, lightly bodied sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour thickener. Flour must be cooked into the liquid to remove its raw taste and to thicken evenly. Mixing it with butter first helps prevent lumps when it is stirred into the hot sauce.

“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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