Skip to main content
Main

Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made from boiled mushrooms, seasoned with salt, pepper, butter, and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

  1. Cut off the stalks of the mushrooms.

  2. Place the mushrooms in boiling water.

Make the sauce

  1. Season with a small amount of coarse sea salt, black pepper, and butter.

  2. Boil until tender.

  3. Thicken the sauce with 1 tablespoon of flour and a piece of butter the size of a walnut.

  4. Add a little lemon juice for extra flavor, if desired.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the meat.

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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

  3. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, 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

Mushrooms
Provide the main body and earthy flavor of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor and giving the sauce a smooth mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter, giving it body.

The step that matters

Thicken the sauce with flour and butter. Flour must be cooked into the butter and liquid so starch can swell and thicken the sauce. Adding it to liquid without mixing well can cause lumps, and insufficient cooking leaves a raw floury taste.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, pepper, butter, flour):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

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

More mushroom sauce recipes

Brown 64White 28for Chicken 10Italian 8for Chicken or Rabbit 5for Poultry 5 See all 226 →

You might also like

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes