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Sauce

Mushroom Sauce

A sauce made with butter, flour, lemon juice, onion, nutmeg, salt, and boiled mushrooms.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,318 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Mushroom Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Dissolve the flour in water and add it to the melted butter.

  3. Let the mixture stew for a while.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add the lemon juice, chopped onion, nutmeg, and salt.

  2. Boil the mushrooms in salted water until done, then chop them finely.

  3. Mix the chopped mushrooms with the other ingredients, adding more lemon juice to taste.

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

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

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

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

  3. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Onion + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,626 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 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
Provides fat and richness, carrying flavour through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the melted butter into a smooth, body-giving base for the sauce.
Mushrooms
Supply the main earthy flavour and savoury body of the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and mushroom flavours.
Onion
Adds savoury aromatic flavour to the sauce base.

The step that matters

Dissolve the flour in water before adding it to the butter. Flour added directly to hot butter can clump; dissolving it in water first helps it disperse evenly, giving a smooth, lump-free thickened sauce.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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