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MUSHROOM KETCHUP (another way) (Proceed as before directed but)
Proceed as before directed, but let the mushrooms stand twelve hours only, warming them over the fire to extract the juice. Strain the whole through a sieve, and boil and skim the liquor, adding to each quart, when clear, equal quantities of ginger, black peppercorns, and allspice, about one and a half ounces in all, two small blades of mace, and five or six cloves. The mushrooms may be pressed dry after the juice has been strained from them: the juice may be used for flavouring hashes, or any dish where great delicacy is not required. Time, five minutes to boil without spice, fifteen minutes with.
This is the second of two mushroom ketchup methods in Cassell's, and it depends entirely on the first: the salting stage, the crushing, and the bottling all sit in the recipe above it. Read on its own it is a set of proportions rather than a complete procedure, and the gaps are exactly where the safety problem lies.
- Why not as writtenMushroom liquor is a low-acid food. Boiled briefly and stored in corked bottles in the store cupboard, it is an anaerobic, low-acid, ambient-temperature product — the conditions in which Clostridium botulinum can produce toxin. Historic mushroom ketchups relied on a heavy salt cure for keeping quality, and this text gives no salt weight of its own: it defers the salting, and the bottling, to the recipe printed before it.
- The missing measurementsThe salt quantity, the standing-and-draining routine and any bottling or sealing method all live in the preceding recipe, which is not reproduced here. Without a stated salt weight, a stated acid level and a stated processing temperature, there is nothing to judge the preservation by. A current tested recipe should be used instead.
- "Twelve hours only, warming them over the fire"The shortened stand is what distinguishes this variation, with warming apparently standing in for a longer cold stand. The text does not say how long the warming lasts, but a warm hold before any boil is a further reason to treat this version with more rather than less caution than its parent recipe.
- A quartAn imperial quart of strained liquor is 40 fl oz, about 1.14 litres — a quarter larger than the US quart of 32 fl oz, which matters when you are reading the spice ratio.
- One and a half ounces of spiceGinger, black peppercorns and allspice in equal parts, roughly 42 g in total, so about 14 g of each per imperial quart. That is an assertive dose. The recipe does not state the form of the ginger, though the liquor is strained, which suits whole spices rather than ground.
- Blades of maceA blade is one flattened piece of the lacy aril from a nutmeg, weighing well under a gram. Two blades is a light touch, not a spoonful of ground mace.
- The pressed mushroomsThe mushrooms may be pressed dry after the first straining, and that juice is directed to hashes or any dish "where great delicacy is not required" — the first strain to ketchup, the pressings to rougher work. The recipe says nothing about keeping the pressings.
Mushroom ketchup is the older sense of the word: before tomatoes took the name, a ketchup (or catsup, from a Malay or Hokkien source generally traced through kecap, a fermented brine) was a thin, dark, salty seasoning liquid poured into stews, gravies and made dishes by the spoonful. English cooks made it from field mushrooms, walnuts, oysters, cockles and anchovies, and the mushroom version was the household standard through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or The The technique is straightforward salt extraction: layer mushrooms with salt, let the cells collapse and give up their liquor, then strain, boil and spice. What this variation offers is speed, trading a long cold salting for a warming over the fire and a single overnight stand. The spicing — ginger, pepper, allspice, mace, cloves — is the standard British preserving set of the period, the same set that went into pickles and browning sauces.