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To Keep Mushrooms

This recipe preserves large button mushrooms by salting, drying, and reducing the liquid with mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,529 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

To Keep Mushrooms

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Draw out the water

  1. Lay the mushrooms on a sieve with the stalks facing up.

  2. Sprinkle salt over them to draw out the water.

Cook, drain and jar

  1. Once drained, place them in a pot and set in a cool oven for 1 hour.

  2. Carefully remove them and let them cool and drain.

  3. Boil the liquid that comes out with a blade or two of mace until reduced by half.

  4. Transfer the mushrooms to a clean, dry jar.

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. Mushroom + macetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 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

Large button mushrooms
Provide the bulk and the moisture that is drawn out, drained and then cooked down.
Mace
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the liquid that is boiled down.

The step that matters

Reduce the drained liquid by half. Boiling concentrates the flavour and aroma of the mace as water evaporates. Checking the volume keeps the liquid from becoming too strong or bitter.

“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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