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White Mushroom Sauce

A creamy sauce made with mushrooms, béchamel, flour, butter, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

White Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Remove the stems from the mushrooms and clean them with a little salt and a soft cloth.

  2. Soak the mushrooms in cold, slightly salted water, then drain or dry them with a cloth.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the béchamel sauce or white sauce with the flour and butter, and bring to a boil.

  2. Add the mushrooms and simmer for 10 to 20 minutes until tender.

  3. Season the sauce with salt, mace, and cayenne to taste 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.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Sauce + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,338 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Flour and butter 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

Button mushrooms
Provide the main body and earthy flavour of the sauce.
Béchamel or white sauce
Forms the creamy base that gives the sauce its body.
All-purpose flour
Thickens the sauce as it heats with the butter and liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, rounded fat flavour.

The step that matters

Simmering the mushrooms until tender. Mushrooms hold a lot of water, and cooking them too briefly leaves them rubbery and can leave the sauce thin. Simmering gently until tender lets them release and reabsorb their juices and soften evenly into the sauce.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

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