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Sauce

Cream Sauce

A sauce made from sliced mushrooms, parsley, butter, flour, consommé, and cream, strained for a smooth finish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Cream Sauce

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 ↓

Cream Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, combine sliced mushrooms, parsley, butter, and salt.

  2. Cook over medium heat until the butter is clear and begins to fry.

  3. Stir in flour, being careful not to make it too thick.

  4. Add consommé and reduce to the thickness of béchamel sauce.

  5. Stir in cream and strain through a fine sieve.

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 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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Mushroom + parsleytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,132 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Parsley + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 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

White mushrooms
Release moisture and savoury flavour that forms the body of the sauce.
Butter
Carries flavour from the aromatics and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and consommé.
Consommé
Provides the liquid base and concentrated savoury flavour as it reduces.
Cream
Adds richness and a smooth, silky texture to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Reducing after adding the consommé. The sauce thickens as liquid evaporates and the flour swells. Reducing too little leaves it thin, while reducing too far makes it pasty and salty, so watch for a béchamel-like consistency.

Swap the parsley

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Capersfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Parsleythe original

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