Skip to main content
Sauce

Mushroom Ketchup

A pickled mushroom sauce made with salt, pimento, cloves, pepper, mace, and ginger.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mushrooms

  1. Sprinkle coarse sea salt on the mushrooms.

  2. When they liquefy, remove the juice.

Make the ketchup

  1. Add pimento and cloves to the juice.

  2. Boil gently and strain.

Second quality

  1. For a second quality, treat any remaining liquor with pepper, mace, and ginger.

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. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Pepper + gingertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

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

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

Pickled mushrooms
Provide the main body and savoury flavour of the ketchup.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out liquid from the mushrooms and preserves them.
Pimento
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavour to the juice.
Cloves
Contribute a strong, aromatic spice note to the juice.

The step that matters

Boil gently and strain. Boiling too hard can break down the liquid and cook off aromatics unevenly, while gentle heat lets the spices infuse. Straining removes solids so the ketchup stays smooth and clear.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

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