Skip to main content
Main

Mushrooms Preserved

A method of preserving Cepes mushrooms in salt, garlic, and olive oil by boiling in a hot water bath.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Garlic and olive are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 25,665 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Mushrooms Preserved

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Peel and wash the Cepes mushrooms.

  2. Dry the mushrooms on a towel.

Pack the cans

  1. Arrange the mushrooms in layers in pint tin cans.

  2. Season each layer with coarse sea salt.

  3. Add 1 clove of garlic to each can.

  4. Pour enough olive oil into each can to cover the mushrooms.

Seal and process

  1. Seal the cans and boil them in a hot water bath for 1.5 hours.

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. Garlic + olivetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,665 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Mushroom + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,700 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

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

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

  4. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Clove + olivetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,866 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Cepes mushrooms
Provide the main body and earthy flavour of the preserve.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons each layer and helps draw out moisture from the mushrooms.
Garlic
Adds aromatic pungency that mellows during the long processing.
Best olive oil
Covers the mushrooms to exclude air and carry flavour through the preserve.

The step that matters

Sealing and boiling in the water bath. Mushrooms are low-acid, so they must be fully sealed and held at a sustained boil for the full time to prevent spoilage by dangerous microbes. Under-processing leaves the contents unsafe to store.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Rosemaryfits better
  3. Oreganofits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, garlic, 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.

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes