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Mushroom Catsup
Pick over (wash and drain, if needed) one peck of mushrooms; slice these, and put over the fire with a little water, just enough to keep them from burning. Cover the saucepan and let cook, stirring often, until the mushrooms are soft; then press through a fine sieve. To the pulp add one pint of vinegar, two tablespoonfuls of salt, half a teaspoonful of cayenne, two tablespoonfuls of mustard, one tablespoonful of cinnamon, and half a teaspoonful, each, of mace and cloves (ground). Cook about half an hour longer (or until thick), then taste, and add such other seasoning as is needed. Bottle and seal.
This is a bottled low-acid mushroom purée with no measured processing, and that is where it fails. The notes below explain the reading of the text and the specific reason it should not be put up this way.
- Why it is unsafeMushrooms are a low-acid food and are among the classic vehicles for Clostridium botulinum, which thrives in the oxygen-free interior of a sealed bottle held at room temperature. The recipe gives no processing time, no jar temperature and no acidity target, so there is no way to know the finished catsup is either acid enough or heated enough to be shelf stable.
- The vinegar is not enough to rely onOne pint of vinegar against the pulp of a whole peck of mushrooms is a small fraction of the total volume, and cooking it down concentrates solids as well as acid. Nothing here brings the mixture reliably to the pH 4.6 or below that safe unrefrigerated bottling requires, and the recipe offers no way to check.
- "Bottle and seal" is not a processIn books of this kind it meant filling hot bottles and corking or waxing them. It is a closure, not a heat treatment: no boiling-water bath, no pressure canning, no hold time. If you want mushroom catsup, use a current tested recipe with a stated process, or make a small batch and keep it in the refrigerator as a fresh condiment rather than a preserve.
- A peck, for scaleA peck is a dry quarter-bushel, eight quarts by volume. Sliced mushrooms are light and airy, so a peck runs roughly 5 to 6 lb, cooking down to only a quart or so of pulp. The scale explains the heavy hand with salt and spice.
- The spicingCinnamon, mace, cloves, mustard and cayenne are the sort of spicing found in English pickling and bottled-sauce recipes of the period, meant to season a sauce used by the spoonful rather than eaten on its own. The mustard is almost certainly dry ground mustard rather than prepared.
- "Press through a fine sieve"The point is to leave behind skins and fibre and keep only the dark liquor and pulp; a food mill or the back of a ladle against a mesh sieve does the same work. It is a texture step, not a safety step, and does nothing about the pathogen risk.
Mushroom catsup is the older sense of the word: before tomatoes took the name, a "catsup" or "ketchup" was any thin, dark, salted and spiced condiment sauce, and the term is generally traced to the Amoy Chinese kê-tsiap, a fermented fish brine, carried west through Southeast Asian trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. English cooks made the style their own with walnuts, anchovies, oysters and above all mushrooms, whose glutamate-rich liquor gave a savoury depth that dressed up plain boiled and roast meats.