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To Pot Mushrooms

A dish of button mushrooms cooked with mace, white pepper, powdered cloves, butter, clarified suet, and wrapped in white paper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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. Choose large button mushrooms that are not brown inside, peel and wipe the larger ones.

  2. Combine the mushrooms with mace, white pepper, and powdered cloves in a pot.

Cook the mushrooms

  1. Heat over fire, shaking until the liquid dries up.

  2. Add butter.

  3. Stew the mushrooms until tender.

  4. Pour off the butter.

  5. Let them cool.

Pack and seal

  1. Pack the mushrooms tightly into a pot, making the surface even.

  2. Add lukewarm butter.

  3. Cover with white paper.

  4. Pour clarified suet over the paper to exclude air.

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. Mace + white peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,695 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Form the bulk of the dish, softening into a tender body as they cook.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour, and the layer on top helps keep the mushrooms moist.
Clarified suet
Forms a fat layer over the paper that excludes air from the packed mushrooms.
Mace
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour to the mushrooms.
White pepper
Adds mild, sharp heat that seasons the mushrooms without dark specks.
Cloves
Adds strong, sweet aromatic flavour to the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Drying the liquid before adding butter. Mushrooms release a lot of water as they heat. Shaking them over the fire until that liquid evaporates keeps it from diluting the butter and gives a concentrated flavour. Leftover moisture would also encourage spoilage in the sealed pot.

Swap the white pepper

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, mace, 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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