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To Pickle Mushrooms Brown

A pickled brown mushroom preparation using ginger, mace, white pepper, shallots, salt, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and shallot are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,982 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

To Pickle Mushrooms Brown

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the dirty end of the mushroom stalks and wash them in a little vinegar.

  2. Place the mushrooms in a saucepan with ginger, mace, white pepper, shallots, and salt.

Cook and pickle

  1. Add enough vinegar to cover the mushrooms and simmer gently for 30 minutes.

  2. Once cooled, transfer the mushrooms to wide-mouthed bottles.

Seal

  1. Cork the bottles tightly and cover with bladder.

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 + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Ginger + shallottop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  4. Ginger + macetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Shallot + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,374 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Large button mushrooms
Form the main body of the pickle, absorbing the spiced vinegar as they simmer.
Vinegar
Acts as the pickling liquid, adding acidity that preserves and sharpens the flavour.
Shallots
Contribute savoury, aromatic flavour that infuses into the pickling liquid.
Ginger
Adds warm, aromatic pungency that complements the mushrooms.

The step that matters

Simmering gently in vinegar. Simmering gently for the full 30 minutes lets the vinegar and spices penetrate the mushrooms and softens them evenly. A hard boil can toughen mushrooms and break them apart, so keep the liquid at a gentle simmer.

Swap the white pepper

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, ginger, shallot, mace, 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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