Skip to main content
Main

To Pickle Mushrooms Brown

A pickled mushroom recipe using ale vinegar, red wine, cloves, white pepper, ginger, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Pickle Mushrooms Brown

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the mushrooms and cut off the stalks.

  2. Prepare the vinegar as before.

Pickle

  1. Soak the mushrooms in the vinegar for two to three weeks.

  2. In an earthen pot, combine cloves, white pepper, and ginger.

  3. Pour boiling ale vinegar over the spices.

Bottle and store

  1. Drain the mushrooms from the vinegar and place them in dry bottles.

  2. Seal the bottles and store them dry.

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. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Red wine + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together849 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Mushroom + red winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together720 recipes

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

  4. Vinegar + red winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together575 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  5. Mushroom + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,663 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
The main vegetable, which soaks up the vinegar and spice flavours as it pickles.
Good ale vinegar
Provides sharp acidity that flavours the mushrooms and helps preserve them.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the pickling liquid.
White pepper
Adds a mild, sharp aromatic heat to the pickling liquid.
Ginger
Adds a fresh, aromatic warmth that rounds out the spiced vinegar.

The step that matters

Pour boiling ale vinegar over the spices. Heat helps release the aromatic compounds in whole spices into the vinegar, so the flavour develops more fully. Pouring carefully avoids splashing and burns.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, vinegar, red wine, clove, ginger):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, vinegar, red wine, clove, ginger. 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.

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes