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Sauce

Catsup

A thick, spiced condiment made by salting and boiling down mushrooms with pepper and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,529 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquid

  1. Macerate mushrooms with salt for three to four days.

  2. Strain and measure the liquid, then boil it quickly until reduced by half.

  3. Add black pepper or cayenne and mace to the liquid.

Settle and bottle

  1. Pour the catsup into a clean jug or jar, cover with a cloth, and keep in a cool place overnight.

  2. Gently pour off the sediment and bottle the catsup, corking well.

  3. Add a teaspoon of salad oil to each bottle before corking to exclude air.

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 + macetop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,529 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Release their liquid during salting, which becomes the body of the ketchup.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the mushrooms and preserves the liquid.
Black peppercorns
Adds sharp, pungent warmth that rounds out the flavour.
Mace
Adds a warm, aromatic spice note to the finished liquid.
Salad oil
Forms a thin layer on top of each bottle to exclude air.

The step that matters

Boiling the strained liquid down by half. Boiling concentrates the flavour and thickens the liquid. If it is under-reduced, the ketchup stays thin and is more prone to spoiling in storage. Boil quickly so it reduces without scorching.

“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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