Skip to main content
Sauce

Mushroom Ketchup

A preserved mushroom sauce made by salting, boiling, and bottling mushroom juice with spices and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Salt and press

  1. Clean the mushrooms and remove the stalks.

  2. Mix the mushrooms with ½ pound of coarse sea salt and let them stand overnight.

  3. Drain the liquid.

  4. Add more salt and stir.

  5. Let stand another day.

  6. Press out the juice.

  7. If the juice does not run freely, place the mushrooms in a cool oven for 5-6 hours to help extract more juice.

Boil and strain

  1. Boil it slowly for 1 hour with ¼ pound of salt, cloves, peppercorns, and ginger.

  2. Strain the liquid through a fine sieve.

Bottle and seal

  1. Bottle it and add a dozen peppercorns to each bottle.

  2. Add 1 dessertspoon of brandy to each bottle.

  3. Seal the bottles with new corks.

  4. Cut the corks to fit snugly.

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

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

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Clove + brandytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,362 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Supply the bulk of the juice and the savoury, earthy flavour of the ketchup.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the mushrooms and helps preserve the extracted liquid.
Peppercorns
Add a warm, sharp aroma to the simmered liquid.
Brandy
Adds a rich aroma and helps preserve the bottled ketchup.

The step that matters

Drawing out the juice. Salt pulls liquid out of the mushroom cells through osmosis, so the salting and resting time sets how much juice you get. If the mushrooms stay dry, the strained liquid will be thin and small in quantity, which is why the recipe suggests gentle oven heat to coax out more.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (mushroom, clove, brandy):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

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

More mushroom ketchup recipes

Sauce 4 See all 229 →

You might also like

Ginger SauceGinger Sauce12 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes