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To Pot Mushrooms

A preserved mushroom dish stewed in salt water with mace, cloves, and butter, then cooled and stored in a bladder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

To Pot Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the mushrooms in salt water.

  2. Remove the mushrooms and wipe them with a cloth.

  3. Dip the mushrooms back into the salt water.

  4. Place the mushrooms in a saucepan.

Make the mushrooms

  1. Add the salt, mace, and cloves to the saucepan.

  2. Let the mushrooms stew until half the liquid is evaporated.

  3. Stir in the butter.

  4. Continue to stew until no liquid remains at the bottom of the pan.

Pot and store

  1. Transfer the mushrooms to pots.

  2. Cover tightly with bladder when 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 + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  3. Mushroom + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,663 recipes

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

  4. Mushroom + macetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 recipes

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

  5. Mace + buttertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,405 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Mace and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,405 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Button mushrooms
Form the bulk of the dish and release their liquid as they stew, which is then reduced.
Fresh butter
Adds fat and richness, coating the mushrooms as the liquid cooks off.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic flavor to the mushrooms.
Cloves
Adds a strong, sweet-spicy aroma to the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Stew until no liquid remains at the bottom of the pan. Mushrooms release a lot of water as they cook. Evaporating it concentrates their flavor and lets the butter cling to the mushrooms instead of pooling in thin liquid.

Swap the mace

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

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

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