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To Pickle Mushrooms White

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,152 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

To Pickle Mushrooms White

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wet a piece of flannel in milk and water, and rub the mushrooms until they are white.

  2. Place the mushrooms in milk and water until all are done.

  3. Heat fresh milk and water over the fire and steam the mushrooms for a little while.

  4. Carefully transfer the mushrooms to a sieve and spread them on flannels, covering them to keep in the steam.

  5. Boil enough double distilled vinegar to cover the mushrooms with a little mace, white peppercorns, and white ginger.

  6. Pack the mushrooms into pint bottles with wide necks and fill with the pickle.

  7. Once the pickle is cold, add a spoonful of sweet oil to each bottle.

  8. Cork the bottles and tie a bladder over them.

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 + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  2. Mushroom + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together867 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Mushroom + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  4. Milk + macetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,346 recipes

    Shared aroma: sabinene (woody, terpenic).

  5. Mushroom + vinegartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,070 recipes

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

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

Swap the mace

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

  1. Clovefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Peppermintfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, milk, vinegar, ginger. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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