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Sauce

Catsup

A mushroom-based sauce made by macerating mushrooms with salt, reducing the liquid, seasoning, and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Prepare the liquid

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

  2. Strain and measure the liquid.

  3. Boil it quickly until reduced by half.

  4. For every quart of liquid, add ½ oz black pepper and 1 drachm mace or 1 tsp cayenne.

Settle and bottle

  1. Pour the catsup into a clean jug.

  2. Cover with a folded cloth.

  3. Let it sit overnight.

  4. Gently pour off the sediment the next day.

  5. Transfer to small bottles.

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

  7. Cork the bottles well.

  8. Seal with rosin.

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).

  2. Pepper + macetop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

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

Pepper and mace barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,257 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Mushrooms
Provide the main flavour and liquid once salted and macerated.
Coarse sea salt
Draws liquid out of the mushrooms and helps preserve the mixture.
Whole black pepper
Adds sharp, aromatic heat that flavours the reduced liquid.
Mace
Adds warm, aromatic spice notes to the reduced liquid.

The step that matters

Boiling the strained liquid quickly until reduced by half. Rapid boiling concentrates the flavour and drives off water so the ketchup keeps better. Slow simmering over a long time can dull flavour and extend the time the liquid spends at warm temperatures where spoilage can start.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, pepper. 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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