Skip to main content
Main

Mushroom Catsup

A preserved mushroom sauce made by salting, simmering, and spicing mushrooms, then reducing and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 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 the contents three to four times each day.

Extract and spice 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 return it to the fire, boiling for 15 minutes.

  3. For each quart of liquid, 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.

Reduce and bottle

  1. Boil the mixture until it reduces to half the quantity, then let it cool, strain, and bottle it.

  2. 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 + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Provide the main flavour and liquid that is drawn out by the salt.
Coarse sea salt
Draws juice out of the mushrooms and preserves the liquid against spoilage.
Black pepper
Adds sharp, pungent spice that deepens the savoury character of the ketchup.
Allspice
Adds warm aromatic notes that round out the spiced flavour.

The step that matters

Reducing the strained liquid by half. Boiling concentrates the flavours and evaporates water, so the ketchup becomes more intense and keeps better. Stopping too early leaves it thin and more prone to spoiling.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, pepper, allspice, clove, 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.

More mushroom ketchup recipes

Sauce 4 See all 229 →

You might also like

Mushroom SoupMushroom Soup60 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes