Important: Safety Warning
This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
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Pickled Mushrooms
Secure sufficient small fresh mushrooms, cut the stalks off short and remove the skins with a piece of flannel dipped in salt. Place them in a stewpan together with one teaspoonful of pounded mace and one-half teaspoonful of ground pepper for each pint, dredge with salt and toss over a moderate fire. After the juice has run from them, and has all dried up, pour in enough vinegar to cover; boil for about three minutes, then turn all into jars or wide-mouthed bottles. On the day following, cover the jars or bottles with parchment, tie down securely, see that they are perfectly air-tight and stow them away in a dry cupboard for future use.
This is a room-temperature preserve of a low-acid vegetable, sealed with paper rather than heat, and it falls squarely outside modern food-safety practice. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.
- Mushrooms are a low-acid foodCultivated and wild mushrooms sit near pH 6, well above the pH 4.6 threshold below which Clostridium botulinum cannot grow. Safety in any mushroom pickle depends entirely on acid being present in a measured, verified amount throughout the jar.
- "Enough vinegar to cover" is not a measurementThe recipe specifies neither the strength of the vinegar nor a ratio of vinegar to mushrooms and residual liquid. Mushrooms are largely water and will dilute the brine as they sit, so the finished acidity is unknown and unknowable from these instructions.
- Parchment tied down is not a sealA paper cover keeps out dust and slows evaporation. It does not exclude oxygen or micro-organisms, and it cannot produce the vacuum that a modern two-piece lid and a timed heat process produce. "Perfectly air-tight" in 1896 meant something far looser than it does now.
- Three minutes is not a process timeBoiling the mushrooms in vinegar for three minutes cooks them; it does not process the packed jar. Nothing here heats the sealed container, so any spores surviving in the mushrooms or on the jar remain in an anaerobic, low-acid, room-temperature environment -- the exact conditions botulinum toxin requires.
- "A dry cupboard for future use"Indefinite shelf storage is the specific problem. Botulinum toxin is odourless and tasteless and produces no reliable spoilage signs, so there is no way to inspect a jar of this and judge it sound.
- If you want pickled mushroomsUse a current tested recipe from a food-preservation authority, which will give you a specified vinegar strength, a weighed ratio, and either a boiling-water process time or instructions to keep the jars refrigerated and eat them within weeks.
- Archaic terms in the text"Pounded mace" is the dried outer covering of nutmeg, crushed to a powder; ground mace from a jar is the same thing. A "moderate fire" on a coal range corresponds to medium heat, and the salt-and-flannel rub was one period method for skinning mushrooms, a step no longer thought necessary.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name fronted The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf (1896), assembled a volume that reads less like a restaurant's repertoire than like a comprehensive household encyclopaedia, and its long pickling and preserving chapters sit oddly beside the hotel's terrapin and canvasback. Pickled mushrooms belong to an older English tradition, alongside mushroom ketchup and walnut pickle, in which the autumn glut of field mushrooms was captured in spiced vinegar for a winter store cupboard; recipes of essentially this shape appear in English cookery books from the eighteenth century onward. The salt-and-flannel skinning and the covering of parchment tied down with string both point to a kitchen that predates reliable canning jars, and the confident instruction to "stow them away in a dry cupboard" is a reminder that the microbiology of anaerobic preserves was not understood as domestic knowledge until well into the twentieth century.