Skip to main content
Sauce

Superlative Catsup

A thick mushroom-based ketchup flavored with brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mushroom and brandy work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 206 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Superlative Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the reduction

  1. In a stewpan, boil the mushroom juice gently for 30 minutes.

  2. For a thicker catsup, continue boiling until the juice is reduced by half.

  3. Skim the surface and pour the liquid into a clean, dry jar.

Settle and clarify

  1. Cover the jar and let it sit in a cool place overnight.

  2. Carefully pour off the clear liquid, avoiding the sediment at the bottom.

  3. Add 1 tablespoon of brandy for each pint of catsup and let it sit again.

  4. Pour off the new sediment and bottle the catsup in pint or half-pint containers that have been washed with brandy.

  5. Seal the bottles tightly and store in a cool, dry place.

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 + brandytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together206 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushroom juice
Provides the concentrated flavour base that the long boil reduces into catsup.
Brandy
Added after settling to preserve the catsup and add a mellow aroma.

The step that matters

Carefully pour off the clear liquid. Disturbing the sediment at the bottom would cloud the catsup and carry solids into the bottles. Letting it settle overnight and pouring slowly keeps the liquid clear and stable in storage.

“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.

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