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Mushrooms

Mushrooms preserved in a spiced brine of salt, ginger, pepper, mace, bay leaf, lemon rind, sherry, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Mushrooms

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the roots of the mushrooms and clean them with a flannel cloth and salt.

  2. Place the mushrooms in a jar and add salt, ginger, whole pepper, mace, bay leaf, lemon rind, and sherry.

  3. Cover the jar tightly and heat it on the stove until it is just about to boil.

Steep and pickle

  1. Let it sit for one or two days until the mushrooms absorb the liquid and spices.

  2. Cover the mushrooms with hot vinegar, seal the jar, and heat it again until it just comes to a boil.

  3. Remove from heat and let it cool completely.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Mushroom + sherrytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,176 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methoxy-4-methylphenol (smoky, clove).

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

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

  5. Mushroom + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Small white button mushrooms
The main ingredient, which softens and absorbs the pickling liquid and spices.
Hot vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity that preserves the mushrooms and gives the pickle its tang.
Sherry
Adds wine flavour and depth to the pickling liquid.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the mushrooms and seasons them during the initial curing.

The step that matters

Heating the jar before the vinegar is added. Heating only until the liquid is just about to boil helps the mushrooms take up flavour without turning them mushy. Overheating breaks down their texture and can leave them soft and watery.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Peppermintfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, ginger, pepper, lemon, sherry, 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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