Skip to main content
Main

Mushroom Powder

A powdered seasoning made from dried mushrooms, spices, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Mushroom Powder

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Wash the mushrooms thoroughly and cut off the stalks.

Cook and dry

  1. In a saucepan, combine mushrooms, mace, ground pepper, onions with cloves, coarse sea salt, allspice, nutmeg, and butter.

  2. Cook without water until the liquid evaporates.

  3. Place the mixture on sieves to dry completely.

Grind and store

  1. Once dry, grind the mushrooms to a powder and store in tightly corked bottles.

Use

  1. To flavor soup or gravy, add 1 teaspoon of the powder a minute or two before serving.

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 + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Large mushrooms
Provide the main body of the powder, concentrating their earthy flavor as their moisture cooks off.
Butter
Adds fat that carries the spice aromas and helps the mixture cook evenly in the pan.
Onions with cloves
Add savory sweetness and aromatic depth as they cook down with the mushrooms.
Mace
Contributes a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the powder.

The step that matters

Cook without water until the liquid evaporates. Mushrooms release a lot of water when heated. If the liquid is not fully driven off, the mixture stays damp and can spoil in storage, and it will not grind into a dry powder. Cooking patiently over moderate heat lets the moisture evaporate while the flavors concentrate.

Swap the allspice

The recipe marks allspice as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, mace, pepper, onion, clove, nutmeg, butter):

  1. Allspicethe original
  2. Cinnamonfits about as well
  3. Thymefits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, mace, pepper, onion, clove, nutmeg, 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.

You might also like

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