Skip to main content
Sauce

Mushroom Catsup

A preserved mushroom ketchup made by boiling mushroom liquid with spices and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the mushrooms

  1. Break the mushrooms into a deep earthen pan and mix in the salt.

  2. Cover with a cloth or paper and place in a cool oven overnight.

Make the ketchup

  1. The next day, strain off the liquid and measure it.

  2. Boil the liquid for 15 minutes.

  3. For each quart of liquid, add the black pepper, allspice, ginger, and mace.

  4. Boil the mixture for an additional 20 minutes.

Bottle

  1. Once cold, transfer to bottles, cork them well, and seal the necks to keep air out.

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
Release their liquid under salt, which becomes the base of the ketchup.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the mushrooms and preserves the liquid against spoilage.
Black pepper
Adds sharp, pungent heat that rounds out the savoury flavour.
Allspice
Contributes warm, aromatic spice notes to the liquid.
Ginger
Adds a bright, aromatic warmth to the liquid.
Mace
Adds a delicate, nutmeg-like aroma to the liquid.

The step that matters

Cover and place in a cool oven overnight. Salt must draw out the mushroom liquid slowly and gently; too much heat would cook the mushrooms rather than extract their juice, changing the flavour and clarity of the ketchup.

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.

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