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Mushroom Ketchup, Another Way

A mushroom ketchup made by slow cooking mushrooms with spices, aging, and preserving in a corked jar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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, Another Way

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the liquor

  1. Clean the mushrooms and remove any worm-eaten parts.

  2. Add salt to the mushrooms and place them in a slow fire.

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

Season and boil

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

  2. Boil and skim the mixture well.

Bottle and age

  1. Once cooled, cork the mixture tightly.

  2. After two months, boil it again with fresh spices and horseradish.

  3. Cork tightly again; 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

Large-flap mushrooms
Release their liquor, which forms the flavourful base of the ketchup.
Coarse sea salt
Draws liquid out of the mushrooms and acts as a preservative.
Shallots
Add savoury, aromatic depth to the liquor.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and savoury flavour to the liquor.
Horseradish
Adds sharp pungency to the ketchup when boiled in again before storage.

The step that matters

Boiling and skimming the mixture. Skimming removes foam and impurities that rise while boiling, leaving a clearer, cleaner-tasting liquid that keeps better in 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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