Home › Vegetables › Pickled Mushrooms
Pickled Mushrooms
Select small, sound pasture mushrooms, as nearly uniform in size as possible. Let them stand for half an hour in cold water, then drain, cut off the stalks and rub gently with a soft moist flannel dipped in salt to remove the outer skin. Bring to a boil sufficient vinegar to cover the amount of mushrooms, adding to each quart of vinegar 2 tablespoonfuls of salt, half a grated nutmeg, a blade or two of mace, and a few peppercorns. Put in the mushrooms and simmer very gently for ten minutes, then pour them into small jars with the spices evenly distributed through them. Let them stand for a day, then cover and screw on the caps of the jars.
The seasoning here is sound English pickling practice, but two parts of the method fall outside anything a modern kitchen should attempt: the mushrooms are gathered wild, and the jars are filled, left open for a day, and then simply capped with no measured acidity and no heat process. Use a current tested recipe for pickled mushrooms if you want the dish.
- "Pasture mushrooms" means foragedThe field mushroom (Agaricus campestris) grows in grazed grassland. White Amanita species, including the destroying angel, are usually found in or at the edge of woodland rather than open pasture, but young white mushrooms of any kind are hard to separate: at the small stage this recipe calls for, the gills may not yet have taken colour and the most useful field character is missing. Small white mushrooms are the hardest of all to identify with confidence.
- The jars are never processedHot mushrooms go into jars, stand uncovered for twenty-four hours at room temperature, and are then sealed. That is an open invitation to surface moulds and yeasts, and it gives no seal worth the name. Nothing in the method drives air out of the jar or sterilises the rim.
- Acidity is unmeasuredMushrooms are a low-acid food and depend entirely on the vinegar to stay safe. The recipe specifies neither vinegar strength nor the ratio of vinegar to mushrooms after simmering, and the mushrooms release a great deal of water into the pickle. Without a known final pH, an anaerobic sealed jar of mushrooms is exactly the environment in which Clostridium botulinum produces toxin.
- Screw caps of 1900 are not screw caps of todayOld screw-capped jars are not modern canning jars -- The recipe assumes a jar whose cap is simply screwed down by hand onto contents that were never brought to a canning temperature. Modern two-piece lids behave differently and will not rescue an unprocessed pack.
- A blade of maceMace is the dried aril around the nutmeg seed, and a "blade" is one flattened piece, commonly reckoned at something like a quarter to half a teaspoon ground. It appears here alongside grated nutmeg, which period pickling recipes frequently pair.
- The flannel and saltRubbing the caps with salted flannel was the usual period way to take the outer skin off a mushroom before cooking. Modern practice is simply to wipe cultivated mushrooms rather than peel them.