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Mushroom Pickles
Lay button mushrooms in one and one-half teaspoons of vinegar, three and one-half teaspoons of salad oil, salt and pepper for several hours.
Drain and serve.
— Miss Violette Hall
A one-line marinated mushroom relish of the kind that filled the back pages of community cookbooks. It is a quick pickle in the loose old sense — dressed and eaten the same day, not preserved.
- The quantities are incompleteNo weight of mushrooms is given, and 1½ teaspoons vinegar with 3½ teaspoons oil is enough dressing for perhaps 4 ounces of small mushrooms. Treat the numbers as a ratio — roughly two parts oil to one part vinegar — and scale to the mushrooms you have.
- "Salad oil"In American cookbooks of this period salad oil could mean olive oil, but cottonseed and other refined seed oils were also sold under the name. Either olive oil or a neutral oil works; olive oil sets up in the refrigerator, so let the dish stand at room temperature a few minutes before serving.
- Button mushroomsGenuinely small closed-cap white mushrooms, left whole. Larger caps should be quartered so the marinade reaches the interior, since nothing here is cooked and the dressing only penetrates the cut surfaces.
- Do not wash them longMushrooms absorb water and then refuse the oil. Wipe with a damp cloth or rinse briefly and dry thoroughly before dressing.
- "Several hours"Two to four hours is enough for the vinegar and salt to draw out liquid and soften the caps. Marinate covered in the refrigerator rather than on the counter, and eat the same day — this is not a preserve and will not keep.
- Salt draws liquidExpect a pool of mushroom juice in the bowl; that is what gets drained off. Season again lightly after draining, as much of the salt goes with the liquid.
- ServingA relish or hors d'oeuvre rather than a side dish — figure a small spoonful per person, served cold with cold meats, or on buttered bread.
"Pickle" was a far broader word in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American kitchens than it is now: it covered anything steeped in vinegar, from crocks of cucumbers put down for winter to a bowl of vegetables dressed an hour before dinner. This receipt belongs firmly to the second kind, and its appearance under a contributor's name is characteristic of community-collected cookbooks, which took recipes at whatever length the contributor chose to write them down -- which is one reason the quantity of the main ingredient often goes unstated. Cultivated button mushrooms became commercially available in the United States in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, with commercial growing concentrated in a few districts, notably in southeastern Pennsylvania; that supply is what makes a casual dish of raw marinated mushrooms plausible at all.