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To Pickle Mushrooms Brown
Miss Brokovski.
Take the small buttons and rub them very clean with a flannel, and some vinegar; then put them in a dish with a little salt over them to draw the liquor from them, then put them into a kettle to stew very gently in their own liquor; boil them in good vinegar, with mace, cloves, and black pepper.
This is a preserving recipe with no measured quantities, no jar procedure and no storage instruction, and mushrooms are among the riskiest vegetables to pickle badly. The notes below explain the terms and why the method cannot be followed as printed.
- Why it fails: acidity is never measuredMushrooms are a low-acid food, and safe pickling depends on the finished brine being acidic enough throughout the pieces — in modern practice a tested vinegar-to-mushroom ratio with vinegar of known strength. This recipe names no proportions and no vinegar strength, so there is no way to know the result is acidified.
- Why it fails: botulism in stored mushroomsImproperly acidified home-preserved mushrooms are a documented vehicle for Clostridium botulinum, which thrives in the low-oxygen interior of a sealed jar. The recipe gives no processing time, no sealing method and no direction to refrigerate. Use a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority instead.
- Also: the mushrooms themselvesMushrooms at this date were often gathered wild from pasture as well as bought, and several dangerous species resemble young field mushrooms at the button stage, when the gills and stem base are still hidden. Identification of unopened caps is unreliable.
- "Kettle"In this period a kettle generally means a wide, fairly deep cooking pot, not a vessel for boiling water. The mushrooms are meant to sweat gently in it over low heat.
- "Rub them with a flannel"Flannel was commonly used for wiping mushrooms in recipes of this period. The vinegar here acts as a cleaning agent; the modern equivalent is a soft brush.
- Salting to "draw the liquor"Dry salt pulls a surprising amount of liquid out of mushrooms, which then serves as the stewing medium. Nothing in the original tells you how much salt or how long, which is one more reason the proportions cannot be reconstructed.
- MaceMace is the dried outer covering of the nutmeg seed, sold as blades or ground. It is milder and more floral than nutmeg and was one of the standard pickling spices of the period, alongside whole cloves and black peppercorns.
"Brown" distinguishes this from the pale pickle: white pickled mushrooms were kept as light as possible with salt, lemon and white wine vinegar, while a brown pickle used dark spiced vinegar and was expected to colour. Both are generally said to have been common in Victorian and late-Georgian larders, along with mushroom ketchup and mushroom powder, because the season for field mushrooms was short and intense and cultivated mushrooms are often described as still something of a market luxury in most places. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) was compiled from contributions by named local women, and recipes gathered that way tend to read as reminders between cooks who already knew the proportions rather than as complete instructions, which is exactly the gap that makes this one unusable now.