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Brown Mushroom Sauce

A savory sauce made from canned mushrooms, Bovril, butter, flour, and water, optionally flavored with onion and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Brown Mushroom Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the roux

  1. Melt and brown 2 tablespoons butter, then add 2 tablespoons flour and let it brown.

Make the sauce

  1. Gradually stir in 1 cup water with ½ teaspoon Bovril dissolved, or use flavored stock.

  2. Combine the liquid from the can of mushrooms with ¼ teaspoon Bovril in a saucepan to make a brown sauce.

  3. Thicken the sauce, then add half of the can of mushrooms cut into quarters.

  4. If using canned mushrooms, drain and cook them in the hot sauce for 5 minutes.

  5. If using fresh mushrooms, peel and chop them, then add to the hot sauce and cook for 10 minutes.

  6. Season with salt, pepper, and optional onion and lemon juice.

Garnish

  1. Reserve the remaining mushrooms for garnish.

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

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

  3. Mushroom + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Browns with the flour to build a nutty, toasted flavour in the base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks in the melted butter.
Mushrooms
Add earthy flavour and a tender, meaty texture to the sauce.
Bovril
Adds savoury, salty depth to the stock and brown sauce.

The step that matters

Browning the butter and flour. Cooking the roux until it turns brown builds the sauce's colour and toasted flavour. Stopping too early leaves a pale, floury taste, while overbrowning can turn it bitter.

Swap the onion

The recipe marks onion as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, pepper, lemon, butter, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, pepper, lemon, 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.

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