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Sauce

Mushroom Catsup

A preserved mushroom sauce made by salting, fermenting, and spicing mushrooms, then reducing the liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,620 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Mushroom Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the mushrooms

  1. Wipe firm, fresh mushrooms and break them into pieces.

  2. Add 2 tablespoons of coarse sea salt for every quart of mushrooms and layer them in a large crock, sprinkling salt over each layer.

  3. Let the jar sit in a cool place for three days, stirring three to four times each day.

Extract the liquid

  1. After three days, transfer the mushrooms and salt to a preserving kettle and warm them slowly over low heat.

  2. Once the juice flows freely, strain it off and boil for 15 minutes.

Spice and reduce

  1. Measure the liquid and add 1 tablespoon each of whole black pepper and allspice, 2 blades of mace, 1 bay leaf, a tiny section of garlic, a small piece of ginger root, and a pinch of cayenne.

  2. Return the liquid to the fire with the spices and boil until reduced by half.

  3. Let it cool, strain, and bottle it.

Finish and seal

  1. Seal the bottles and optionally add 1 teaspoon of brandy to each bottle for preservation.

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. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Garlic + gingertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Mushroom + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,700 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Allspice + macetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Firm, fresh mushrooms
Provide the main body and savory flavor of the catsup once their juice is extracted.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the mushrooms and helps preserve the extracted liquid.
Whole black pepper
Adds sharp, warm spice that gives the catsup depth.
Allspice
Contributes warm, aromatic spice notes to the reduced liquid.

The step that matters

Boiling the liquid down by half. Reducing the strained liquid concentrates its flavor and thickens it, and the long boil with salt helps keep the finished catsup stable in storage.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, pepper, allspice, garlic, ginger, brandy):

  1. Clovefits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, pepper, allspice, garlic, ginger, brandy. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

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