Mushroom ketchup: not as expensive as you think

This post is all about my attempt at one of the signature flavours of the 18th century: mushroom ketchup.  Mushroom ketchup was to the 18th century what garum was to the Romans, an all purpose flavouring agent used in a wide variety of dishes, and in fact the taste is not unlike fish sauce.  It's a salty, savoury, umami flavour.

Due to the popularity of mushroom ketchup, historical recipes tended to assume you were making the stuff in industrial quantities, which is prohibitively expensive for most of us today.  But do you, as a modern cook, actually need an industrial sized bucket of mushroom ketchup?  In this post I'm going to make a smaller, affordable quantity of this ketchup using about 500 grams of mushrooms.  If you do need a large quantity of it, here is an awesome cheat recipe made with mushroom bouillon.

Recipes for mushroom ketchup varied, but they all followed the same basic pattern.  You salted your mushrooms and left them to sit for a while so the salt could draw out the mushroom liquor, then you squeezed all the liquor into a pot, boiled it with spices, and strained it again into bottles.  Some cooks added wine or ale, but this was apparently optional, and the spices involved varied.

Here is a recipe from Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery.

And here is John Farley's version from The London Art of Cookery.  The similarity in titles, by the way, was probably not accidental.  Farley seems to have "borrowed" a lot from Hannah Glasse, who herself plagiarized earlier authors.

At least one recipe requires the salted mushrooms to be placed in a low oven for 24 hours, but I don't care to leave the oven on for a full 24 hours with no one to watch it while I sleep and go to work and besides, not all recipes included this step, so I just put my casserole dish full of mushrooms next to the hot water cylinder.  Note that I have chopped my mushrooms to make them easier to squeeze.

Here is what I ended up with.  At this point the mushrooms have been sitting for a full 24 hours and have released an amount of juice which, frankly, surprised me because I had expected some liquid to be visible, but as you can see there's none.  They smelled good though, so there's that.

Maybe this is why John Farley says to leave the salted mushrooms for four days, and maybe Hannah Glasse didn't say to heat the mushrooms because her audience already knew that.  But my mushrooms weren't looking good.  Hmmm.  What if I zapped them in the microwave?  Microwaving things makes them soggy, right?

Now we're getting somewhere!  In this picture they've been microwaved for five minutes.

I microwaved my salted mushrooms for one minute at a time on medium power, about fifteen minutes in total.  I took them out to check their progress after each minute and kept going until there was a lot of liquid in the dish and the mushroom pieces were soft.

It seems you do need to heat the mushrooms in order to extract their liquor, but you can totally cheat and use a microwave.

Here's my modernized version of Hannah's mushroom ketchup recipe.  For around 200 mls of ketchup you will need:

500 grams mushrooms
About 2 tablespoons of table salt (it doesn't need to be exact)
1 teaspoon whole peppercorns
1/8 teaspoon ground cloves
1/8 teaspoon ground mace
1/8 teaspoon ground ginger

Clean your mushrooms, remove the stalks, and chop them.  Layer them in a pan with the salt sprinkled over them and leave them somewhere warm until they're soft and sitting in a nice pool of mushroom liquor or, y'know, help them along in the microwave.

Squeeze all the mushroom liquor into a saucepan using a cloth.  This will take a lot of squeezing, and you will be able to extract a lot more liquor than you think.  Don't throw the squeezed mushrooms away, you can dry them completely and use them for cooking.

Add the spices to your saucepan and simmer it, covered, for 15 minutes, then cool it and strain it into a bottle.  The ketchup will be watery, and that's okay.  It's a concentrated flavouring not a sticky condiment.  You add small quantities of it to boost the flavour of stews and gravies.

If you have a whole kilo of mushrooms (try the farmers' market), it's worth doubling this recipe because it is labour intensive and trust me, you will find plenty of uses for mushroom ketchup.  It's delicious.  There's a reason people in the 18th century were nuts about this stuff.  It tastes, obviously, of mushrooms, but with wonderful aromatic citrus and gingery top notes from the spices.  10/10, this stuff deserves to make a comeback.

Beef stewed savorily

Beef stewed savorily, from John Farley's The London Art of Cookery.  Just look at that cross section!

This is another John Farley recipe.  It's a kind of pot roast, made with beef sirloin which has been stuffed with forcemeat, rolled up, and braised in a stew pan.

The recipe.  I used fish sauce instead of anchovy liquor, because I didn't have any.  I didn't have oysters either, but they're optional anyway.

I used rump steak for this recipe, because the cut of meat now known as rump in the UK and Australasia is roughly equivalent to what 18th century Londoners called the sirloin.  We know this because Mr Farley included a helpful diagram.  He also included a forcemeat recipe, which I made ahead of time and refrigerated.  It only takes about half an hour to make and I can assure you it's time well spent.

That's why the lighting is different in this photo - it was taken the night before.

This is the forcemeat.  It's made from minced meat and bacon cooked with mushrooms, shallots etc. and whizzed in the blender pounded in a mortar until smooth.  It's supposed to be made with veal, but I used a 1:1 mixture of beef and pork.  It tastes amazing and is unquestionably the best part of the entire dish.

Beef stewed savorily is not a difficult recipe to make.  Here you can see my piece of rump steak with forcemeat spread all over it.  All it needs now is to be rolled up like a Yule log made from meat and secured with string.

Two Yule logs, technically, because the rump steak came in two pieces.

I was apprehensive about the stewing part because this is the first time I've ever stewed meat.   I braise meat all the time in the oven and I know this is pretty much the same thing, but when I was a kid stew was one of the things mum made that I absolutely hated, and as a result I've never cooked it.  So I was a little worried the stewing process would ruin this very promising rolled roast.  But Mr Farley didn't let me down.  After consulting the Google academy of culinary skills, I seared the meat well on all sides, and stewed it on a low temperature for two hours.  It came out delicious and very tender, although the beef part was a little bland.  I had suspected this might happen, so while the beef was stewing I made French olive sauce with some of the cooking liquid.

Meat does tend to lose its flavour when boiled, and in the 18th century meat was often boiled, which is most likely why The London Art of Cookery contains an entire section on mouth-watering sauces for all occasions.

The recipe doesn't specify what sauce was intended to be served with beef stewed savorily; presumably this was not something Mr Farley thought he should have to spell out for his readers.  French olive sauce was a great choice, but any rich, savoury sauce or gravy would work well.



The Historical Food Fortnightly Challenge: Savoury.

The Receipt/Recipe: "Beef stewed savorily" from John Farley's The London Art of Cookery.  Technically, however, this is a three-for-one package of savoury recipes since in order to make it I first had to make Hannah Glasse's mushroom catchup (blog post forthcoming) and John Farley's forcemeat recipe.

The Date/Year and Region: 18th century London.

How Did You Make it: As per the recipe, I stuffed a piece of beef with forcemeat, rolled it up, and stewed it.

Time to Complete: All up, just over two hours, but two of those hours were cooking time.  The forcemeat took another half hour.

Total Cost: Including the mushroom ketchup and the forcemeat, the total cost came to around NZ$30 (currently roughly equivalent to US$20).  It's not a cheap recipe.  But on the other hand, I have plenty of forcemeat and ketchup left over for future recipes, and some good stock for sauces.

How Successful Was It?  Very.  This is something I'd happily serve to guests, and as long as you've made your forcemeat ahead of time it has potential to be a dish that looks impressive without requiring a lot of effort.  You do, however, need to serve it with a good sauce or gravy, and you do need to take the time to make the forcemeat stuffing.  Don't be tempted to cheat and use sausage meat, you'll regret it.

How Accurate Is It? I used modern kitchen equipment and made a couple of ingredient substitutions, but for the most part I followed the original recipe and I believe my beef stewed savorily probably turned out the way John Farley intended.

My new favourite sauce

I recently got an ebook version of The London Art of Cookery by John Farley, first published in 1783, which is available free on Google Books or at Archive.org.  There are some good-looking recipes in this book and I'm excited to try them.  So when I braised some beef on the weekend and didn't want to waste the braising liquid, I made French Olive Sauce from page 149.  This is a very simple sauce recipe.  All you need to do is simmer olives in stock, and season with salt, cayenne pepper and lemon.

Although this is an 18th century recipe, it has what I think of as a very modern taste: strong and salty with rich umami overtones.  It goes well with beef and vegetables, and I strongly recommend it.

Like many recipes from this time period there are no ingredient quantities listed.  This is because you don't need exact quantities.  If you did, Farley would tell you, as he does with many of his other recipes.  With this one the quantities involved depend on how much sauce you want and how much of the ingredients you have available.  I used about a cup of stock and maybe half a cup of finely chopped olives.

The recipe doesn't specify whether to chop the olives, but I recommend chopping them finely so they'll mix through the sauce.  The recipe doesn't specify how long to stew the sauce either, but mine simmered on a medium low heat for about an hour.  Depending on your stock, you may not need to add any salt, so be sure to taste the sauce before you season it.  If it doesn't thicken up as much as you'd like, a sprinkle of cornflour will solve that problem.  The recipe specifies veal stock, but I used beef stock and you could probably use any kind of stock, including vegetable stock if you wanted to make a vegan version.