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Sauce

Pepper Sauce

A sauce made from boiled green peppers, onions, garlic, horseradish, and spices, then mashed and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Pepper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the peppers

  1. Combine green peppers, onions, garlic, horseradish, cider vinegar, and water in a kettle.

  2. Boil until soft enough to mash through a sieve with a spoon.

Add the spices

  1. Add black pepper, allspice, mace, cloves, and salt to the mixture.

  2. Boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Pass all spices through a sieve before adding to the peppers.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Horseradish + allspicetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Garlic + horseradishtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together719 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Green peppers
Form the bulk of the sauce and, once softened and mashed, give it body and a vegetal flavor.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and body as they soften during boiling.
Cider vinegar
Provides acidity and a sharp tang that balances the cooked peppers.
Horseradish
Adds pungent heat that mellows as the sauce cooks.

The step that matters

Boil until soft enough to mash through a sieve. Peppers and onions must be fully softened so their cell walls break down. Undercooked pieces stay fibrous and will not pass smoothly through the sieve, leaving a coarse, uneven sauce.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, onion, garlic, horseradish, cider, vinegar, allspice):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, onion, garlic, horseradish, cider, vinegar, allspice. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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