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Potted Mushrooms

Mushrooms stewed in butter, spiced, salted, packed in small pots, and stored with clarified butter and mutton suet.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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. Prepare the mushrooms without wetting them and wipe them dry after salting.

Cook and drain

  1. Stew the mushrooms in butter until tender, adding more spices than usual.

  2. Drain the mushrooms in a dish raised at one end to remove excess butter.

Pot and store

  1. Once cooled, pack the mushrooms tightly into small pots.

  2. Pour warm clarified butter over the mushrooms and store in a cool, dry place.

  3. For immediate use, place them on a clean shelf.

  4. For longer storage, cover with dry paper and melted mutton-suet.

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 + muttontop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together685 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Butter + muttontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,781 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

Mushrooms
Form the main body of the dish, becoming tender and absorbing the butter and spices as they stew.
Butter
Cooks the mushrooms gently and gives them richness, and its warm layer on top helps seal the pots.
Spices
Add aroma and savoury flavour that carries through the stewed mushrooms.
Mutton-suet
Forms a solid fat seal over the top for longer storage, keeping air out.

The step that matters

Draining the mushrooms. Excess butter left on the mushrooms can turn rancid during storage, so draining them in a sloped dish before potting helps the preserved mushrooms keep better.

“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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