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Pickled Mushrooms

Pickled mushrooms preserved in vinegar, spices, and mutton fat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Nutmeg and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Pickled Mushrooms

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Wash the mushrooms with a flannel dipped in salt water.

  2. Place them in a saucepan and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  3. Boil the mushrooms three times in their own liquid.

  4. Drain the mushrooms in a sieve and spread them on a clean cloth to cool.

Pickle and seal

  1. Pack the cooled mushrooms into wide-mouthed bottles with whole mace, sliced nutmeg, and cloves.

  2. Boil vinegar with whole pepper, ginger, and bay leaves for a few minutes, then strain it.

  3. Once the vinegar is cool, pour it over the mushrooms and fill the bottles with fried mutton fat.

  4. Cork the bottles, tie a bladder and leather over them, and store in a cool 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. Nutmeg + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Nutmeg + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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, absorbing the salt and spiced vinegar as they are preserved.
Vinegar
Acidifies the mushrooms, keeping them tangy and helping preserve them in the bottles.
Mutton fat
Forms a fat layer sealing the top of the bottles, excluding air to help keep the mushrooms.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture from the mushrooms and seasons them for preserving.

The step that matters

Cooling the mushrooms before packing. Mushrooms must be fully cool before going into bottles and vinegar. Warm mushrooms create steam and condensation that can dilute the pickle and encourage spoilage. Letting them drain and cool on a clean cloth removes surface moisture, so the vinegar and fat seal the jars properly.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, nutmeg, clove, vinegar, pepper, ginger, mutton):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, nutmeg, clove, vinegar, pepper, ginger, mutton. 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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