Skip to main content

To Pickle Mushrooms Brown

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

To Pickle Mushrooms Brown

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cut off the stalks of the mushrooms and wash them in cold water.

  2. Rub the mushrooms with a cloth and skin the large ones.

  3. Sprinkle salt over the mushrooms and let them stand for 24 hours.

  4. Put the mushrooms in a stew-pan with the liquor, cloves, mace, white pepper, nutmeg, ginger, and horse-radish.

  5. Boil until the liquor is nearly half reduced, then pour it off.

  6. For the vinegar, add one-third Port wine, boil together, and remove any scum that rises.

  7. Place the mushrooms in wide-mouthed glass bottles or small jars and seal with bladder and leather.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  4. Horse + radishtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together529 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyraldehyde (malty, chocolate).

  5. Nutmeg + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, clove, mace, nutmeg, ginger, horse, radish):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, clove, mace, nutmeg, ginger, horse, radish. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

You might also like

Horseradish SauceHorseradish Sauce23 recipesHorseradish ButterHorseradish Butter6 recipesMushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipes