Heston Blumenthal was making mushroom ketchup on Saturday Kitchen this morning, which really is all the reminder I need.

Ketchups came in a wide variety of flavours back in the 18th Century. They were, essentially, sauces and gravies made from anything you had a glut of. Seasonal fruit and veg appear a lot, but you can also find slightly stranger ketchups, like lobster. They contained everything they knew had a preserving element – salt, sugar, vinegar and alcohol, proportions varying depending on what you were preserving – and were commonly used like stock is today, to add flavour to other soups and sauces. They were far runnier than what we’re used to, and the flavours much stronger.

It’s believed ketchups were inspired by the sauces of the Far East. Lacking anything even vaguely similar to soy beans, we turned to mushrooms first, and worked out from there. Tomato ketchup was a latecomer from America, and was considerd a chutney in the UK at first, since it was so much thicker than any ketchup we knew. I’ll try and dig out the recipe for it for next week; I find 19th Century ketchup makes a wonderful salsa for barbeques!

So, here’s a recipe for mushroom ketchup. It’s slow, but it’s simple!

Ingredients

1 kg Mushrooms (Button, for preference)

500g salt

Fresh ginger

Pepper

Cloves

Mace sticks

Equipment

Large saucepan

Muslin bag

Bottles

Instructions

Chop the mushrooms, and layer them with salt in a pan Find somewhere cool to put it, and leave it overnight.

Get your hands in there and squeeeeeeeeeze those mushrooms, ’til all the juice comes out.

Boil them for a minute or two.

Empty in the muslin bag, and squeeeeeeeeeze again.

Boil it again. For every litre of liquid, add 5 grams of fresh ginger and 1/2 a teaspoon of pepper. Keep boiling for fifteen minutes.

Leave to cool, and add a little brandy.

Bottle it, throwing in a couple of cloves and a stick of mace into each bottle.

This will keep for-absolutely-ever (well, Hannah Glasse gives it two years), and can be added to all sorts of things. It makes a nice alternative to soy sauce, it’s great with beef, and it’s a good way to give soup a bit more richness. If you want a thicker sauce, add cornflour to the sauce, let it thicken, and add some diced mushrooms marinaded in vinegar.

Glasse, Hannah; The Art of Cookery made Plain and Easy: Which Far Exceeds Any Thing of the Kind Yet Published … ; Printed for W. Strahan, J. and F. Rivington, J. Hinton, 1774; digitsed 2007; accessed June 2009.