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MUSHROOM KETCHUP (another way) (Prepare the mushrooms and salt)
Prepare the mushrooms and salt them as in the last recipe. Let them stand twelve hours, then work them well with the fingers, and leave them again for thirty-six hours, stirring them occasionally with a wooden spoon. At the end of that time measure them into an earthen jar, and with each quart put half an ounce of allspice, three-quarters of an ounce of black pepper, and three-quarters of an ounce of Jamaica pepper. Cover the jar closely, set it in a pan of boiling water, and let it boil gently for fully two hours. Take it out, let it stand until cool, then pour off the juice into a clean pan, as clear as possible, and boil the liquid for half an hour. Skim it thoroughly, and put it into a jar. When quite cold, pour it through a jelly-bag until it is bright and clear. It must be poured gently, so as not to disturb the sediment. Put a tea-spoonful of brandy with each half-pint of liquor, and pour it into small bottles. Cork these securely, and either tie a piece of bladder over them or resin the corks, and keep the ketchup in a cool, dry place. When pouring the juice from the mushrooms do not squeeze them, or the liquid will look thick and muddy. The residue need not be wasted, for, after a common ketchup has been made as described, it can be dried and used for mushroom powder (see MUSHROOMS, POWDERED). Probable cost of mushrooms, variable. Sufficient, a table-spoonful of ketchup to half a pint of sauce.
This is a shelf-stable bottled sauce made from a low-acid vegetable liquor, sealed with resin or bladder and stored without refrigeration. That combination is the reason it cannot be followed today, and the notes below explain where it breaks down as well as what the older terms mean.
- Why it fails: a low-acid preserve with no measured acidMushroom liquor has a pH well above 4.6 and contains no vinegar at all in this version. Sealed airtight in bottles and kept at cellar temperature, it is exactly the anaerobic, low-acid environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. The half-hour boil and the two hours in a water bath kill vegetative bacteria but not the spores.
- The salt is not quantified hereThe only preservative in the recipe is the salt carried over from "the last recipe", which this page does not state. Salt-cured products need a measured brine concentration to be safe; an unstated quantity cannot be assessed, and the teaspoon of brandy per half-pint is far too little alcohol to preserve anything.
- Bladder and resined corksTying dried bladder over the mouth or sealing the cork with resin was the period's answer to an airtight closure. It is not a sterile seal, it cannot be tested, and it excludes air well enough to favour anaerobes while doing nothing about them. Any modern equivalent of this sauce should come from a current tested recipe with a stated acidification step.
- Wild mushroom identificationThe recipe does not say which mushrooms are used; the field mushroom of English pasture is the likely assumption. Ketchup-making destroys every visual clue a misidentified mushroom would otherwise give you, and the toxins of Amanita species are not affected by boiling.
- Allspice and Jamaica pepper are the same spiceJamaica pepper is allspice, so the ingredient list as printed calls for the same thing twice, in different amounts. Either the compositor duplicated a line or one entry was meant to be another spice; the text as it stands is internally inconsistent.
- Weights and measuresA quart here is the imperial quart, 40 imperial fl oz rather than the American 32 US fl oz, so the spicing per unit of liquid is lighter than it looks. A jelly-bag is a fine flannel or muslin cone for gravity straining; the instructions not to squeeze the mushrooms and to pour gently, so as not to disturb the sediment, are what produce the 'bright and clear' result described.
- Strength and yieldThe closing note — a tablespoonful to half a pint of sauce — is the useful part of the entry. This was a concentrate, roughly the role soy sauce or a commercial mushroom essence plays now, not a condiment poured onto the plate.
Mushroom ketchup is the older English sense of the word: ketchup, or catsup, is generally traced to the salted fish and soy brines of maritime Southeast Asia, and English cooks of the eighteenth century reproduced the idea with whatever gave a dark, salty, savoury liquor — walnuts, anchovies, oysters, and above all mushrooms. Tomato was a latecomer to the family and only took the name over in the nineteenth century. The method here, salting mushrooms until they collapse into their own juice and then extracting and clarifying that juice, is essentially a domestic way of making glutamate-rich seasoning long before glutamate was identified; the same liquor is the backbone of the bottled table sauces that were becoming factory goods just as Cassell's was compiled. The instruction to dry the spent pulp for mushroom powder is characteristic of the book's economy: nothing bought by weight was allowed to leave the kitchen unused.