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Mushrooms

Mushrooms preserved in a spiced sherry mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the roots of the mushrooms and clean them with a flannel cloth and salt.

  2. Place the mushrooms in a jar.

Steep

  1. Add salt, ginger, whole pepper, mace, bay leaf, lemon rind, and sherry to the jar.

  2. Cover the jar tightly and let it sit on the hob or stove.

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  3. Mushroom + sherrytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,176 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Ginger + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Small white mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish and absorb the flavours of the sherry and spices.
Sherry
Adds acidity and aroma, carrying the flavour of the spices into the mushrooms.
Salt
Draws moisture out of the mushrooms and helps season them throughout.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, ginger, pepper, lemon, sherry. 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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