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Potted Mushrooms

Mushrooms preserved in jars with salt, pepper, butter, and lard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,525 recipes. Both carry trans-2-decenal, which smells waxy, orange. The science ↓

Potted Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick and wipe the mushrooms.

Pot the mushrooms

  1. Fill preserve jars with mushrooms, seasoning them with salt and the peppers as you fill.

  2. Place a small piece of butter on top of the mushrooms.

  3. Cover the jars closely and set them in a pot of boiling water until done.

Seal and store

  1. When cold, cover with boiling lard, tie paper over, and keep in a cool dry place.

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 + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Small flapped or button mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and absorbing the seasoning as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and moisture, coating the mushrooms as it melts over them.
Boiling lard
Covers the mushrooms to exclude air, helping preserve them and keep them moist.

The step that matters

Cover the jars closely and set them in a pot of boiling water until done. Heating the jars in boiling water cooks the mushrooms and drives air out of the jars. A tight seal and thorough heating are what keep the potted mushrooms safe to store. Stopping too early leaves them underprocessed.

“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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