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Supreme Sauce

A creamy sauce made with butter, flour, stock, cream, mushrooms, and a mustard-egg yolk mixture, served with cold meats.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and mushroom 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 ↓

Supreme Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and lightly fry the flour until golden.

  2. Mix in the veal or chicken stock and stir until it boils.

  3. Add the cream and chopped mushrooms, then cook on the stove for about 10 minutes.

  4. Season with a pinch of coarse sea salt and strain the sauce through a tammy.

Make the dressing and serve

  1. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the salad oil, vinegar, mustard, gherkins, and pepper.

  2. Serve the sauce with cold meats.

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

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

  2. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Flour + mustardtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,066 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, 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

Butter
Enriches the roux with fat and carries flavour during the initial frying.
Flour
Thickens the stock into a smooth sauce once cooked in the butter.
Egg yolks
Emulsify the oil and vinegar, giving the dressing a thick, creamy body.
Cream
Adds richness and a smoother, silkier texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Let the flour fry until golden before adding stock. Cooking the flour in butter removes its raw taste and lets it thicken evenly. Adding liquid too early can leave lumps and a floury flavour.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, veal, cream, mushroom, egg, vinegar):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Asparagusfits better
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, veal, cream, mushroom, egg, vinegar. 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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