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Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from mushrooms, butter, lemon juice, flour, cream, nutmeg, mace, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Put the mushrooms in a saucepan with butter, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  2. Heat until the mushrooms release their liquid.

  3. Thicken the liquid with flour and butter.

  4. Add enough cream to whiten the sauce.

Finish and serve

  1. For a variation, wash and pick the mushrooms, rub with salt, and add nutmeg, mace, cream, and butter rubbed in flour.

  2. Boil and stir until done, then pour around the chicken and garnish with lemon.

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. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Release liquid that forms the body of the sauce and carries its earthy flavour.
Flour
Thickens the released liquid into a smooth, coating sauce.
Cream
Adds richness and softens the sauce, making it paler in colour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the butter and cream.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the flour thicken smoothly when rubbed in.

The step that matters

Thicken with flour and butter. Flour must be cooked in the hot liquid so its starch swells and thickens evenly; adding it raw or in clumps leaves lumps and a floury taste.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Coconutfits about as well
  4. Limefits about as well

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