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White Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made with white sauce and small button mushrooms, seasoned with salt, mace, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and pepper 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 ↓

White Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Cut off the stems from the mushrooms and clean them with salt and a cloth.

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

Make the sauce

  1. Add the mushrooms to boiling white sauce and simmer for 10 to 20 minutes until tender.

  2. Season the sauce with salt, mace, and Cayenne pepper 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 + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Mushroom + saucetop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,480 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Mushroom + macetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Sauce + peppertop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together15,303 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Mace and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 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

Small button mushrooms
Form the body of the sauce and release savoury flavour as they cook.
White sauce
Provides the creamy base that carries the mushrooms and thickens the dish.
Butter
Adds richness and a silky mouthfeel to the white sauce.

The step that matters

Simmering the mushrooms until tender. Mushrooms hold a lot of water and can stay rubbery if undercooked, while overcooking makes them soft and grey. Simmering gently in the sauce cooks them through and lets them absorb flavour without the sauce splitting or sticking.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, sauce, 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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