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Mushroom Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, mushrooms, lemon, flour, cream, nutmeg, and mace, served with chicken or white meats.

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

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Clean and slice the mushrooms.

  2. If using fresh, rub them with salt to remove the tender skin.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the mushrooms, salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

  3. Cook until the mushrooms release their liquid.

  4. Thicken the sauce with flour and add enough cream to lighten it.

  5. For a richer flavor, add nutmeg and a blade of mace.

  6. Stir until well combined.

Serve

  1. Serve the sauce around cooked chickens or other white meats, garnished 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. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Release their liquid during cooking, forming the body and savoury flavour of the sauce.
Butter
Carries the flavour of the mushrooms and gives the sauce a rich, smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the back of a spoon.
Cream
Adds richness and lightens the sauce, giving it a smooth, mellow texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the mushroom flavour and balances the cream.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with flour before adding the cream. Flour must be cooked into the hot butter and mushroom liquid so its starch swells and thickens evenly. Adding cream without this step can leave the sauce thin or lumpy.

Swap the mace

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

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

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