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Mushroom Catsup
Break up the required quantity of mushrooms, put them in a tub, salt over and leave for two days. Afterwards take out all the juice and strain into a saucepan; for every pint, put in one ounce of salt, half a teaspoonful of pepper-corns, six cloves and a third of an ounce of ginger. When boiling, move the catsup to the side of the fire and let it simmer gently.
Oscar gives the seasoning ratio and nothing else — no quantity of mushrooms, no simmering time, and no word on how the finished catsup is bottled or kept. That last omission is why this one belongs on the page as a historical document rather than a working formula.
- Why it fails as writtenMushroom liquor is a low-acid liquid: no vinegar, no lemon, nothing to bring it below pH 4.6. Boiled and then bottled and held at room temperature — which is what "catsup" meant in 1896, a pantry bottle drawn on for months — it is exactly the anaerobic, low-acid environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate. Simmering does not destroy the spores.
- The salt is not enough to carry itThe salt may not be enough to carry it -- An ounce of salt per pint of juice, on top of the two days of dry salting, is a strong seasoning; the dry salting is unmeasured, so the total cannot be worked out from the text, and there is no reason to assume it reaches a preserving concentration for an unacidified vegetable extract. If you want mushroom ketchup, use a current recipe with a measured acid addition and a stated storage method.
- Unspecified mushroomsThe recipe names no variety at all. Any modern version should use cultivated mushrooms.
- Missing quantities and times"The required quantity" is left to the cook, and the simmer is given no duration; other period versions vary widely in how long the liquor is boiled down. There is no way to reconstruct the intended yield or strength from the text.
- Units, for reading purposesA pint is 16 fluid ounces in this American book; a third of an ounce of ginger is a little under 10 grams, roughly four to five teaspoons of dried ground ginger, or a small knob of bruised root. "Move to the side of the fire" is a coal-range instruction meaning reduce to the barest simmer.
Mushroom catsup is the older catsup — the word, generally traced to the Chinese kê-tsiap by way of Malay kecap, meaning a fermented brine or sauce, reached England describing fish and mushroom liquors long before it attached itself to tomatoes. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English kitchens kept a bottle of it as a background savory note for gravies, stews and made dishes, and it belongs to the same family of savoury bottled sauces that later displaced it. The recipe is written as a ratio to be scaled rather than as a household formula with a fixed yield.