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Sauce

Mushroom Catsup

A preserved mushroom sauce made by boiling mushrooms with salt, spices, and rosin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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

Oven, in the book's wordsA very cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Salt the mushrooms

  1. Break a peck of large mushrooms into a deep earthen pan.

  2. Strew ¾ pound of coarse sea salt among the mushrooms.

  3. 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 1 ounce of black pepper, ¼ ounce of allspice, ½ ounce of ginger, and 2 blades of mace.

  4. Boil the mixture fast for an additional 20 minutes.

  5. Once perfectly cold, pour into bottles, cork them well, and dip the necks in melted rosin.

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 moisture out of the mushrooms and preserves the liquid.
Black pepper
Adds sharp, pungent heat that gives the ketchup its savory bite.
Ginger
Adds warm, aromatic spice to the liquid.
Allspice
Adds warm, aromatic sweetness-like spice notes to the liquid.
Mace
Adds a delicate, warm aroma to the liquid.

The step that matters

Salting and resting the mushrooms overnight in a cool oven. Salt draws out the mushroom liquid slowly; if the mushrooms get too warm they can spoil before enough liquid is extracted, so the cool setting matters.

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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