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Sauce

Double Mushroom Catsup

A fermented mushroom sauce made with fresh mushrooms, salt, catsup, pepper, mace, ginger, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and ginger 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 and steep

  1. Sprinkle the salt over the mushrooms and add the catsup.

  2. Stir occasionally for four days.

Boil and season

  1. Drain the liquid from the mushrooms and boil it for 15 minutes with the black pepper, mace, ginger, and cayenne.

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

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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
Supply the bulk and savory, umami-rich flavor that forms the base of the ketchup.
Catsup
Adds tomato sweetness and acidity, plus color and tang to the mixture.
Black pepper
Contributes sharp, aromatic heat that rounds out the savory flavor.
Ginger
Adds a warm, bright aroma that lifts the earthy mushroom flavor.
Mace
Contributes a warm, nutmeg-like aroma to the spiced liquid.
Cayenne
Adds a clean, lingering heat in very small amounts.

The step that matters

Boil the drained liquid with the spices for 15 minutes. Boiling extracts aromatic compounds from the pepper, mace, ginger, and cayenne into the liquid and concentrates the flavor. Draining the mushrooms first keeps the liquid from becoming diluted and watery.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against mushroom, 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.

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