Important: Safety Warning
This page offers rules for telling edible mushrooms from poisonous ones. No such rules are reliable, and these identifications predate modern mycology. Deadly species closely resemble edible ones, and mistakes are regularly fatal. Never eat a wild mushroom on the strength of this text.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Mushrooms, Pickled
Take button mushrooms, as nearly as possible of the same size (small ones are best) and freshly gathered. Cut off the stalks, and rub away the outer skin with a piece of new flannel and some fine salt. Rinse them in salted spring water, drain quickly, and dry in a soft cloth until no moisture hangs about them. Boil together spice and vinegar in proportion to the mushrooms to be pickled, allowing nearly a quart of vinegar to a quart of the buttons, and with one quart of the best white wine vinegar put three small blades of mace, an ounce of crushed ginger, half the quantity of white peppercorns, and a small pinch of cayenne. When the pickle boils put in the mushrooms, and continue the boiling until they are rather soft, which will be in from eight to ten minutes, according to their size. Fill jars, or large-mouthed bottles, and distribute the spice as equally as possible in them. When cold, tie down securely with bladder, and remove to a dry place. Field mushrooms are much to be preferred to those artificially raised.
This is a genuine pickle, but two features of it put it outside what can be reproduced safely today: the preference for wild-gathered field mushrooms and a sealing method with no measured acidity, headspace or heat process. The notes below explain the text rather than adapt it.
- Wild mushrooms are the first problemThe closing line — "Field mushrooms are much to be preferred" — assumes a cook who gathers Agaricus campestris from pasture. Several lethal species, including young Amanita buttons still enclosed in their veil, look very like a small field mushroom at exactly the stage this recipe wants. No amount of pickling detoxifies amatoxins.
- The seal will not holdBladder tied over a jar mouth is a shrink-fit cover, not a hermetic seal, and cannot be relied on to exclude air indefinitely. Nothing in the text sterilises the jar, excludes air, or vents and seals the pack.
- Low-acid vegetable, no measured acidityMushrooms are a low-acid food and are a documented vehicle for Clostridium botulinum in home preserving. The recipe never states the strength of the vinegar, never dilutes to a known level, and gives no processing step, so the finished pH is unknown. A current tested recipe with specified vinegar strength and process time should be used instead.
- Eight to ten minutesBoiling the buttons in the pickle until "rather soft" is a texture instruction, not a preserving one — it drives off moisture and lets the vinegar penetrate. It does nothing about spores, which survive boiling.
- A quart, and the spice quantitiesAn imperial quart is about 40 fl oz (1.14 litres); the American quart is 32 fl oz. Cassell's is British, so read the larger figure. "Three small blades of mace" means three pieces of the lacy outer covering of nutmeg, not ground mace; the ounce of "crushed ginger" is most likely dried root, bruised, though the text does not specify.
- Flannel and fine saltThe salt appears to be functioning as an abrasive here; rubbing the skin from a button with flannel and salt is a method found in period cookery books. The text's call for "salted spring water" is not explained in the recipe itself.
- Why white wine vinegarMost likely colour: malt vinegar would stain the buttons brown, and a pale pickled button suited use as a garnish. The recipe itself says only "the best white wine vinegar".
Pickled mushrooms belong to the English store-closet tradition that also produced mushroom ketchup and mushroom powder: the crop came in a rush during a few damp autumn weeks and had to be captured whole, as a liquor, or as a dried seasoning. Small unopened buttons were valued because they held their shape and stayed white, and jars of them were kept to garnish made dishes and to eat with cold meat. The remark that field mushrooms are preferable to "those artificially raised" belongs to a period when commercial mushroom growing under cover was expanding, and when the cultivated crop was sometimes said to be blander than pasture-gathered fungi. The safety notice at the head of this page, added by the present editors, is a reminder that the wider chapter's confident rules for distinguishing edible from poisonous species predate modern mycology and were never reliable.