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Mushrooms — Continued

Mushrooms preserved in strong sour beer with mace, ginger, cloves, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Mushrooms — Continued

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Lay the mushrooms in a deep dish and sprinkle with coarse sea salt. Let them macerate for several hours until the juice runs out.

  2. Put the mushrooms and their juice in a saucepan and boil gently for 15 minutes. Drain through a sieve and let cool.

Cook in spiced beer

  1. Return the mushrooms to the saucepan with mace, ginger, cloves, peppercorns, and salt. Pour in enough strong sour beer to cover and boil gently until they shrink to about half their size.

Bottle and store

  1. Once cooled, place the mushrooms in glass bottles and pour the beer over them. Seal the bottles with stoppers and tie parchment over the top. Store in a dry cupboard.

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. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  5. Mushroom + beertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together128 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Small button mushrooms
Form the bulk of the preserve and become tender and concentrated as they simmer.
Coarse sea salt
Draws juice out of the mushrooms, seasoning them and concentrating their flavour before cooking.
Strong sour beer
Supplies acidity and a sharp, malty flavour while covering and preserving the mushrooms.
Ginger
Adds warm, aromatic spice that flavours the cooking liquid and mushrooms.
Cloves
Adds pungent, warm aroma that deepens the spiced character of the preserve.

The step that matters

Draining the salted mushrooms before boiling. Salting draws out the mushroom juice, and letting it run out fully lets the mushrooms firm up and concentrate. If they are not fully drained, extra water dilutes the beer and the finished mushrooms stay watery and less flavourful.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, ginger, clove, pepper, beer, vinegar. 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.

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