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Mushrooms

A preserved mushroom dish made by brining with salt, spices, sherry, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the roots of the mushrooms and clean them with a flannel and salt.

  2. In a jar, combine the mushrooms with salt, ginger, whole pepper, mace, bay leaf, lemon rind, and sherry.

  3. Heat the jar on the stove until just boiling.

  4. Let the mixture sit for 1–2 days to absorb the flavors.

Pickle and bottle

  1. Cover the mushrooms with hot vinegar.

  2. Bring the vinegar to a boil.

  3. Once cooled, divide the mushrooms and spices into wide‑mouthed bottles.

  4. Fill the bottles with the vinegar.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Mushroom + sherrytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,176 recipes

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

  4. Ginger + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Small white mushrooms
Form the main body of the pickle and absorb the seasoned vinegar and sherry flavors.
Sherry
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth to the seasoned mushroom mixture.
Hot vinegar
Acidity that preserves the mushrooms and gives the pickle its sharp flavor.
Ginger
Contributes warm, aromatic spice that flavors the mushrooms during the resting period.

The step that matters

Covering the mushrooms with hot vinegar. The vinegar must be fully hot and the mushrooms fully covered so the acid penetrates evenly and the pickle keeps well. Uncovered mushrooms can spoil or darken at the surface.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, ginger, pepper, lemon, sherry, vinegar):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Peppermintfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, ginger, pepper, lemon, sherry, vinegar. 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.

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