Skip to main content
Main

To Pickle Mushrooms

A pickled mushroom recipe using wild meadow mushrooms, vinegar, salt, spices, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mace and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,557 recipes. Both carry myristicin, which smells spice, warm. The science ↓

To Pickle Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Select the smallest wild meadow mushrooms.

  2. Cut the stems close.

  3. Clean the mushrooms with a damp cloth dipped in salt.

  4. Soak the mushrooms in spring water mixed with 1 tablespoon of salt.

  5. Drain the mushrooms.

  6. Dry the mushrooms.

Pickle and jar

  1. In a pot, combine 1 quart of white wine vinegar, 1 heaped teaspoon of salt, whole white pepper, ginger, cayenne pepper in muslin, and 2 large blades of mace.

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  3. Add the mushrooms to the boiling mixture and boil for 6 to 9 minutes until tender.

  4. If mushrooms vary in size, boil larger ones for 2 minutes before adding smaller ones.

  5. Transfer the mushrooms to small jars or warm wide-necked bottles, dividing the spices evenly.

  6. Seal the jars once the mushrooms are cool.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  2. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mushroom + white winetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,765 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity).

  4. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Small wild meadow mushrooms
Form the pickle itself, so smaller mushrooms cook evenly and stay tender in the brine.
White wine vinegar
Provides the acidity that preserves the mushrooms and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out during cleaning and seasons the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Boiling the mushrooms in the vinegar. Mushrooms of different sizes need different times. Larger ones should boil for about 2 minutes before smaller ones are added, so that all of them become tender without the small ones turning mushy.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, white wine, vinegar, white pepper, ginger, pepper, mace):

  1. Clovefits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Nutmegthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, white wine, vinegar, white pepper, ginger, pepper, mace. 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.

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes