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Mushroom Ketchup

A fermented mushroom sauce made by salting, mashing, and boiling mushrooms with spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Mushroom Ketchup

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the mushrooms

  1. Pick dry mushrooms and break them into small pieces.

  2. Place mushrooms in a stoneware pan and sprinkle with ¼ pound of coarse sea salt.

  3. Let them stand for 3 days, stirring and mashing frequently to release juice.

  4. Strain the mixture and press to extract as much juice as possible.

Season and cook

  1. For each quart of juice, add 2 ounces of salt, a few cloves, ¼ ounce of peppercorns, and ¼ ounce of whole ginger.

  2. Optionally, add a pinch of cayenne and a little mace.

  3. Boil slowly for 1 hour, then strain again.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the ketchup, cork well, and wax the corks.

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Mushroom + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,663 recipes

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

  4. Ginger + macetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

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

  5. Mushroom + gingertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together867 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Provide the main body and savory flavor of the ketchup as they release their juice.
Coarse sea salt
Draws juice out of the mushrooms and preserves the mixture during the standing period.
Peppercorns
Add warm, pungent spice that rounds out the savory flavor.
Whole ginger
Adds aromatic warmth to the seasoned juice.

The step that matters

Letting the mushrooms stand with salt. Salt draws juice out of the mushrooms through osmosis, and frequent stirring and mashing help release it evenly. Insufficient standing or salting leaves too little juice and weakens the ketchup's body and preservation.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, clove, ginger):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, clove, ginger. 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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