Name: Mushroom Sauce for Beefsteak or Roast Beef
Ingredients: gravy; flour; salt; pepper; 1 teaspoon kitchen bouquet; mushrooms (cut in pieces or whole button mushrooms)

Why it works: Pepper and mushroom are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,580 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Mushroom Sauce for Beefsteak or Roast Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Thicken the gravy with flour to your desired consistency.
Season with salt, pepper, and kitchen bouquet.
Add the mushrooms and let them heat through.

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.

Pepper + mushroomtop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Flour + mushroomtop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together8,253 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).
Flour + peppertop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together50,459 recipes

Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Gravy: Forms the sauce base that the other ingredients are added to and seasoned.
Flour: Thickens the gravy so it coats the back of a spoon.
Mushrooms: Add earthy flavor and a tender texture to the 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.