Name: Essence of Mushrooms
Ingredients: mushrooms; fine salt; pepper; spices; cloves; bottles; cork

Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Essence of Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Pick mushrooms and place them in a bowl. Sprinkle with fine salt and let sit overnight.
Press the mushrooms to extract moisture, setting aside the liquid. Repeat pressing two more times.
Add pepper, spices, and crushed cloves to the mushroom liquid. Boil and skim off any scum.
Strain the mixture and pour it into bottles, adding two cloves and a peppercorn to each. Cork the bottles and preserve for later use.

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.

Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Mushroom + clovetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,663 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).
Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together13,580 recipes

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