Skip to main content
Sauce

Mushroom Catsup

A fermented mushroom sauce made by soaking mushrooms with salt, spices, peppercorns, and mace, then reducing the liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mushroom and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,529 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Mushroom Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Cut off the stalks of the mushrooms.

  2. Wipe the mushrooms clean.

  3. Break the mushrooms into a bowl.

  4. Sprinkle the mushrooms with salt and mixed spices.

  5. Soak the mushrooms for 3 days, stirring the mixture occasionally.

Strain and season the liquid

  1. Strain the mixture without squeezing.

  2. Measure the liquid.

  3. For each pint of liquid, add ½ ounce of black peppercorns and ½ drachm of whole mace.

  4. Boil until the liquid is reduced by half.

  5. Strain the liquid into a pitcher.

  6. Let the liquid stand for 24 hours.

Bottle

  1. Fill small bottles with the liquid.

  2. Cork the bottles.

  3. Seal the bottles.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Mushroom + macetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fresh mushrooms
Provide the main body and savory flavor that the liquid is drawn from.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the mushrooms and preserves the liquid against spoilage.
Black peppercorns
Add pungent, warm aroma that is extracted during boiling.
Whole mace
Adds a delicate, warm aroma to the liquid during boiling.

The step that matters

Boil until the liquid is reduced by half. Boiling concentrates the flavor and evaporates water, which helps the ketchup keep. Stopping too early leaves it watery and more prone to spoiling, while over-boiling makes it overly thick and intensely salty.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More mushroom ketchup recipes

Sauce 4 See all 229 →

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes