Skip to main content
Sauce

Double Mushroom Catsup

A preserved mushroom sauce made by fermenting mushrooms with salt, catsup, spices, and boiling the liquid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ginger and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,800 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Double Mushroom Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the mushrooms

  1. Sprinkle the salt over the mushrooms.

  2. Add the mushroom catsup.

  3. Stir occasionally for four days.

Drain and boil

  1. Drain the liquid from the mushrooms.

  2. Boil the liquid for 15 minutes with the black pepper, mace, ginger, and cayenne.

Cool and bottle

  1. Let it cool before bottling.

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. Ginger + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

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

  3. Mace + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Mace + peppertop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,257 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

Mace and pepper 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

Fresh mushrooms
Form the bulk of the ketchup and release the liquid that becomes the sauce.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the mushrooms by osmosis and helps preserve them.
Mushroom catsup
Adds concentrated mushroom flavor and a savory, umami base to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring during the four days of salting. Salt must reach all the mushrooms evenly so they release their liquid uniformly. Occasional stirring redistributes the salt and brine, so the mixture cures evenly rather than unevenly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Turmericfits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, ginger, 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.

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