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Mushroom Ketchup, Common
After the clear juice has been poured from the mushrooms, put them into a saucepan, and warm them on the fire. Afterwards press the mushrooms through a tamis until every particle of juice has been extracted. Strain the liquid, boil it for five minutes, then with each pint put a cupful of strong beer, half a blade of mace, a quarter of an ounce of ginger, three cloves, and a quarter of an ounce of allspice. Simmer gently for about fifteen minutes, and when cold bottle for use, with the spices equally divided. Sufficient, a table-spoonful will fully flavour half a pint of thickened sauce or gravy.
This is the second-pressing ketchup of a two-part method: the first, clear liquor having been drawn off the salted mushrooms and bottled separately, the spent caps are wrung out for a coarser sauce. As written it is an unsealed, low-acid preserve, and that is the problem.
- Why it fails nowMushroom liquor is a low-acid food, and this version carries no measured salt, no vinegar and no acidification step. A cupful of beer per pint neither acidifies nor preserves it meaningfully.
- The botulism risk specificallyCooled, corked and stored at room temperature, a low-acid liquid in a sealed bottle is the classic anaerobic environment for Clostridium botulinum. The fifteen-minute simmer kills vegetative bacteria but not spores, and nothing here stops those spores germinating in the bottle. Use a current, tested recipe with specified salt or vinegar quantities, or refrigerate and treat any mushroom liquor as a fresh, short-life product.
- The missing first recipeThe opening line ("After the clear juice has been poured from the mushrooms") presupposes an earlier entry in which the clear juice was drawn off, most likely by salting, as was usual in mushroom ketchup recipes. Read alone, this page gives no salt at all, which is why it reads as less preserved than mushroom ketchups of the period generally were.
- TamisA tamis is a drum sieve of fine woven cloth or mesh; the mushrooms are worked through it with a wooden mushroom or the back of a ladle. A chinois with a pestle, or a jelly bag wrung hard, does the same job.
- Blade of maceMace is the lacy aril around the nutmeg seed, sold dried as flat orange "blades". Half a blade is a fragment perhaps an inch across; ground mace is not a like-for-like swap here because the whole spice is meant to be strained or divided among the bottles.
- Strong beerIn the period this means a high-gravity ale rather than a light modern lager. Its role here is flavour and bitterness, not preservation, which is worth being clear about given the point above.
- Strength in useThe final line is the one genuinely useful measure the recipe gives: a tablespoonful seasons half a pint of thickened sauce or gravy. That is a concentrated condiment, closer to a commercial mushroom or Worcestershire-style sauce than to tomato ketchup.
Mushroom ketchup is the older English sense of the word: before tomatoes took the name, a "ketchup" or "catchup" was any thin, dark, salty, spiced liquor kept for seasoning sauces, and walnut and mushroom versions filled English store cupboards through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The word is generally traced to a Hokkien term for a fermented fish or shellfish brine, carried into English through Southeast Asian trade. The two-stage method here — clear first-run liquor bottled as the fine ketchup, the pressed remainder boiled up as the "common" sort — is a familiar piece of domestic economy in English cookery books, extracting a second grade of product from what would otherwise be thrown out: a spoonful of it was a standard shortcut to depth in a brown sauce or gravy.