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Mushrooms in Brine

A preserved mushroom dish made by boiling mushrooms in a brine of salt, peppercorns, mace, ginger, and oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Mace and ginger are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,152 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Mushrooms in Brine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the brine

  1. Boil water with salt, peppercorns, mace, and ginger for 5 minutes, then remove the scum.

  2. Add the mushrooms and boil gently for 5 minutes.

Bottle and seal

  1. Transfer mushrooms to wide-necked bottles and let them cool completely.

  2. Pour a little salad oil on top, cork with new corks, and cover with bladders.

Use

  1. To use, soak mushrooms in warm water until brine is extracted.

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. Mace + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

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

  2. Mushroom + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together867 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Mushroom + macetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mushroom buttons
Provide the main food being preserved and flavoured by the brine.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the brine and helps preserve the mushrooms by drawing out moisture.
Salad oil (in the method)
Forms a seal on the surface that limits contact with air.

The step that matters

Let the mushrooms cool completely before sealing. Sealing warm mushrooms traps steam and moisture in the bottle, which can encourage spoilage. Full cooling before adding oil and corks keeps the seal dependable.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, ginger. 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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