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Vinegar, Pickles, and Pickling: Select
Select small button mushrooms, remove the stems, rub off the skins with a piece of flannel moistened in salt water and throw them into weak brine of about a cupful of salt to a gallon of water.
Let stand three or four hours. Pour them out on a cloth strainer to drain and dry.
Or after cleaning them with salt and water, put them over a slow fire until the juice from them has dissolved the salt. Then pour them out to drain on a cloth strainer. Finally, pack in suitable jars or bottles and cover with spiced pickling liquid, scalding hot, or place the mushrooms in the spiced liquid and boil for ten minutes. Pack in bottles, cover with the scalding liquid. Let stand until cold, and seal.
This is a sealed, shelf-stable preserve built on an unmeasured "spiced pickling liquid," and mushrooms are the single most unforgiving vegetable to put up that way. The notes below explain the failure points rather than offering a fix.
- No acid is specifiedThe whole safety of a pickle rests on the finished acidity of the brine in the jar, and the recipe never states the strength of the vinegar, the proportion of vinegar to water, or the ratio of liquid to mushrooms. Without a known acidity there is no way to say whether the contents of the jar are a pickle or simply preserved mushrooms in flavoured liquid.
- Mushrooms are a low-acid foodFresh mushrooms sit near neutral on the pH scale and are dense and porous, so the pickling liquid penetrates slowly and unevenly. The centre of a packed jar can remain well above the acidity needed to prevent bacterial growth long after the surface liquid tastes sharp.
- The specific organismClostridium botulinum spores survive boiling, are common in the soil mushrooms grow in, and germinate precisely in the conditions this recipe creates: low acid, no oxygen, room temperature, sealed. Mushrooms preserved at home have a long record as a vehicle for botulism, and the toxin gives no smell, taste or visible sign.
- Sealing hot is not processing"Cover with the scalding liquid. Let stand until cold, and seal" describes a hot pack with no timed heat treatment of the closed jar. Open-kettle methods of this sort were widely relied on around 1900; modern practice separates sealing from the measured processing that actually makes the contents keep.
- The salt step is a flavour stepA cupful of salt to a gallon of water is somewhere around a 4 to 7 percent brine depending on the grain of the salt, used here for a few hours to firm the mushrooms and draw out water. It is far too weak, and applied for far too short a time, to preserve anything.
- "Rub off the skins"Peeling was standard for the older, coarser cultivated buttons and for field mushrooms with tough cuticles. Modern white and cremini buttons are picked young and need only a wipe; the flannel and salt water are no longer called for.
- If you want pickled mushroomsUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will state vinegar strength, jar size and a processing time, or make a refrigerator pickle and eat it within a few weeks.
Pickled mushrooms and their cousin mushroom ketchup were staples of the English and American store cupboard through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, valued as much as a seasoning as a side dish: a spoonful of the liquid went into gravies, hashes and made dishes to give savoury depth. Cultivated button mushrooms, grown in dark sheds and cellars, were becoming steadily cheaper and more reliable by the time this book appeared, which is why the recipe can casually specify small buttons rather than whatever the fields offered. Household Discoveries belongs to a genre of turn-of-the-century domestic compendia that gathered cleaning, laundry, repair and preserving instructions into a single volume, and its preserving section reflects a common assumption of the day: that heat plus a tight seal was sufficient, and that spoilage would announce itself. The bacteriology that overturned that assumption was still being worked out, and home-canning guidance did not catch up until well into the twentieth century.