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Sauce

Catsup

A mushroom-based sauce made by layering salted mushrooms, letting them sit, mashing, straining, and seasoning with pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Mushroom and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,580 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the mushrooms

  1. Clean the mushrooms and place them in a deep dish.

  2. Sprinkle a layer of salt over the mushrooms.

  3. Add another layer of mushrooms and more salt, repeating until the dish is full.

  4. Let the mushrooms sit for 8 to 12 hours.

Strain and season

  1. Mash the mixture and strain off the juice.

  2. For each pint of juice, add ½ ounce of black pepper.

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 + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,580 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Large flap mushrooms
Provide the main body and liquid that becomes the catsup.
Clean salt
Draws moisture out of the mushrooms and helps preserve the juice.

The step that matters

Layering the mushrooms and salt. Salt must cover each layer evenly so it draws juice out of the mushrooms and inhibits spoilage during the long rest. Uneven salting can leave parts of the batch unprotected.

“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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