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Mushroom Ketchup

A preserved mushroom sauce made by boiling mushrooms, seasoning, and storing for a year.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Shallot and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 376 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Mushroom Ketchup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquor

  1. Clean the mushrooms and place them in a stew-pan.

  2. Add a handful of coarse sea salt and set the pan over low heat.

  3. Allow the mushrooms to produce liquor, then strain the liquor.

Season and boil

  1. Add shallots, garlic, pepper, ginger, mace, cloves, and bay leaves to the liquor.

  2. Boil and skim well.

  3. Let it cool and cork tightly.

Rest and reboil

  1. After two months, boil it again with fresh spice and horseradish.

  2. Cork closely and it will keep for a year.

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. Shallot + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together376 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mushroom + shallottop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Shallot + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,000 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Release the liquor that forms the base of the ketchup.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the mushrooms to help produce the liquor.
Shallots
Add savoury depth and aromatic flavour to the liquor.
Garlic
Adds pungent aromatic flavour to the liquor.
Horseradish
Adds sharp pungency during the second boiling.

The step that matters

Boil and skim well. Boiling concentrates the liquor and coagulates proteins that rise as scum; skimming removes them, keeping the ketchup clear and stable for long storage.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, shallot, clove, garlic, pepper, ginger, horseradish. 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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