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Sauce

Mushroom Catsup

A fermented mushroom sauce seasoned with salt, spices, and mushroom liquor.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,620 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Mushroom Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Choose full-grown, fresh mushrooms, gathered when the weather is dry.

  2. Mix the mushrooms with the coarse sea salt and let them sit.

  3. After some time, collect the mushroom liquor.

Season and store

  1. Combine the mushroom liquor with Cayenne, allspice, ginger, and pounded mace.

  2. Stir well and store in a sealed container.

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. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + macetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 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 + 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

Mushrooms
Provide the main body and flavour, and release the liquor that becomes the ketchup base.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the mushrooms and helps preserve the liquor.
Mushroom liquor
Serves as the liquid base that carries the mushroom flavour and spices.
Allspice
Adds warm, aromatic spice notes to the sauce.
Ginger
Adds aromatic warmth and a little pungency to the sauce.

The step that matters

Mix the mushrooms with the salt and let them sit. Salt must be evenly mixed in so it draws out moisture and protects against spoilage. Too little salt or uneven mixing leaves parts of the batch open to spoilage before the liquor is collected.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, pepper, allspice, 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.

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