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Mushroom Powder

A dried mushroom seasoning made by cooking and grinding mushrooms with spices and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 the mushrooms, mace, ground pepper, onions, coarse sea salt, allspice, nutmeg, and butter without adding water. Cook until the liquid evaporates.

  2. Place the mushrooms on sieves to dry.

Powder and store

  1. Grind the mushrooms into a powder.

  2. Store the powder in tightly corked bottles.

Serve

  1. 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

Mushrooms
Form the bulk of the powder, releasing liquid as they cook down and then drying out.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying the flavors of the spices through the cooking.
Onions
Contribute savory sweetness and aroma as they cook in the mushroom liquid.

The step that matters

Cook until the liquid evaporates. Mushrooms hold a lot of water. If they are not cooked long enough, the liquid remains, and the mixture will not dry properly for grinding. Stopping too early can leave the powder damp and prone to spoiling in storage.

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.

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