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Mushrooms

A preserved mushroom recipe using milk, water, vinegar, salt, mace, white pepper, and olive oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and olive are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,571 recipes. Both carry trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Put button mushrooms into a mixture of milk and water.

  2. Wipe the mushrooms with a clean cloth.

  3. Soak them in spring water and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  4. Boil the mushrooms for four minutes, then drain immediately.

  5. Cover the mushrooms between two cloths and dry them well.

Pickle and bottle

  1. Boil distilled vinegar with mace and a little white pepper until cold.

  2. Pour the cooled vinegar over the mushrooms.

  3. Place mushrooms in small glass bottles with wide necks and pour a teaspoon of olive oil on top.

  4. Cork the bottles tightly and tie leather around the corks.

Serve

  1. To use, remove the oil with a cotton-tipped stick or the small end of a teaspoon.

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. Mushroom + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,571 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Vinegar + olivetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,297 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  4. Mushroom + milktop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,231 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  5. Milk + olivetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,828 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Button mushrooms
Form the main body of the pickle, absorbing the vinegar flavour as they sit.
Double distilled vinegar
Acidity that preserves the mushrooms and gives the pickle its sharp flavour.
Olive oil
Forms a layer on top that seals the mushrooms from air in the bottle.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the pickling vinegar.

The step that matters

Drying the mushrooms after boiling. Mushrooms that stay wet after draining dilute the pickling vinegar and can spoil sooner, so they should be dried well between cloths before adding vinegar.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, milk, vinegar, mace, olive):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, milk, vinegar, mace, olive. 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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