Skip to main content
Sauce

Mushroom Catsup

A fermented mushroom sauce made by macerating mushrooms with salt, reducing the liquid, and seasoning with pepper, cayenne, mace, and oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Mushroom Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Macerate mushrooms and 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, then boil again until reduced.

  4. Pour into a clean jug or jar, cover with a cloth, and cool overnight.

  5. Gently pour off the sediment and bottle the catsup.

  6. Add 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 maceration, which becomes the body and flavour of the ketchup.
Salt
Draws moisture out of the mushrooms and helps preserve the liquid.
Black peppercorns
Add sharp, aromatic heat that seasons the reduced liquid.
Cayenne
Adds pungent heat to the ketchup.
Mace
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavour.

The step that matters

Boil the liquid until reduced by half. Boiling concentrates the flavour and evaporates water, which helps the ketchup keep well once bottled. Under-reducing leaves it thin and more prone to spoilage.

“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.

More mushroom ketchup recipes

Sauce 4 See all 229 →

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