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Canned Mushrooms

A sauce made from butter, flour, stock, mushroom juice, and canned mushrooms, seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 ↓

Canned Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a stew-pan until it bubbles.

  2. Add the flour and cook until well combined.

  3. Stir in the strong stock and mushroom juice.

  4. Let it simmer for 1-2 minutes, then strain the mixture.

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

Serve

  1. Serve as a garnish for meats, boiled fowls, fried chickens, cutlets, or sweetbreads.

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

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

  3. Walnut + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Walnut + mushroomtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together763 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and rich flavour, and forms the base for the flour.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked in butter and then combined with the liquid.
Strong stock
Provides the savoury liquid base that carries the sauce's flavour.
Mushroom juice
Adds concentrated mushroom flavour and moisture to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds a small amount of acidity that brightens the savoury flavours.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Cooking the flour in melted butter before adding liquid coats the starch grains in fat, which helps them thicken smoothly without lumps and removes the raw floury taste.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Chickpeafits better
  2. Chestnutfits about as well
  3. Almondfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

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