Name: Pickled Mushrooms
Ingredients: mushrooms; coarse sea salt; white vinegar; mutton fat; mace

Why it works: Mushroom and mutton work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 685 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Pickled Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Clean the mushrooms with water and a cloth.
Boil the mushrooms in a pot of salted water for a few minutes.
Drain the mushrooms in a colander and spread them on a linen cloth, covering with another cloth.
Place the mushrooms in bottles with a blade or two of mace.
Fill the bottles with white vinegar and pour melted mutton fat on top if storing for a long time.

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.

Mushroom + muttontop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together685 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).
Mushroom + vinegartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,070 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).
Mushroom + macetop 21% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,529 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Vinegar + macetop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,415 recipes
Vinegar + muttontop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together615 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-methylbutanol (malty, whiskey).