Name: Mushrooms for Winter Use
Ingredients: ¼ pound (1 stick) of butter; 2 whole cloves; ¼ teaspoon salt; 1 tablespoon lemon juice; 1 quart small fresh button mushrooms; coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt')

Why it works: Butter and mushroom 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 ↓

Mushrooms for Winter Use

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Wash and wipe the mushrooms to remove grit.

Cook

In a frying pan, melt the butter over medium heat.
Add the cloves, salt, and lemon juice to the butter.
Once hot, add the mushrooms and toss for a moment.

Store

Transfer the mushrooms to jars and pour in the melted butter.
Let the jars cool, then add a layer of salt on top.
Cover the jars to keep out dust 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.

Butter + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together12,525 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).
Clove + lemontop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,150 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Clove + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,663 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Lemon + mushroomtop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,633 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together41,227 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter: Coats the mushrooms and carries flavour, and when set it seals the jars.
Mushrooms: Provide the main body of the dish and absorb the buttery coating.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the buttery flavour.
Coarse sea salt: Forms a layer on top of the jars that helps preserve the contents.

The step that matters

Let the jars cool before adding the salt layer. Salt added while the butter is still hot can mix into it rather than settling on top as a protective layer. Letting the butter set first keeps the salt on the surface.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, clove, mushroom):

Plumfits better
Coconutfits better
Applefits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, clove, mushroom. 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.

Lemon Sauce236 recipes

Mushroom Soup60 recipes

Tomato Soup526 recipes

Brown Bread461 recipes

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Mushrooms for Winter Use