Skip to main content
Main

Mushrooms, to Preserve

A method for preserving mushrooms by drying and storing them in clarified butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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, to Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the mushrooms and soak them in cold water with a little lemon juice.

  2. Dry the mushrooms carefully with a cloth.

Cook

  1. Melt the butter in a stewpan and add the mushrooms, lemon juice, pepper, and salt.

  2. Cook over low heat until the liquid evaporates and the mushrooms are dry, stirring to prevent sticking.

Preserve and store

  1. Transfer the mushrooms to pots and pour clarified butter over the top.

  2. For immediate use, they can be kept for a few days without covering.

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. Mushroom + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,525 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

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

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

  4. Mushroom + lemontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,633 recipes

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

  5. 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

Mushrooms
The main ingredient; cooking drives off their moisture until they are dry and concentrated.
Butter
Carries the cooking and, as a clarified butter layer, seals the mushrooms against air.
Lemon juice
Acidity that helps keep the mushrooms light in colour during soaking and cooking.

The step that matters

Cook until the liquid evaporates. Mushrooms release a lot of water as they heat. If the pan is too crowded or the heat too high, they steam and boil instead of drying, and they can stick and scorch. Low heat with stirring lets the water escape so the mushrooms are dry enough to keep.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Mangofits less well
  4. Cherryfits less well

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

Lemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes