Skip to main content
Sauce

Tomato Catsup

A preserved tomato sauce made by boiling tomatoes, seasoning with pepper, salt, mustard, cinnamon, and vinegar, then bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mustard and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,581 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the tomatoes until they can be pressed through a sieve.

  2. To 1 gallon of pulp, add pepper, salt, mustard, cinnamon, and vinegar.

  3. Boil the mixture for a long time until it thickens.

  4. Seal the catsup in bottles.

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. Mustard + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pepper + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main body, pulp and flavour of the ketchup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens flavour and helps preserve the sauce.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that balances the sweetness of the tomatoes.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aromatic spice notes to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for a long time until it thickens. Long simmering evaporates water and concentrates the tomato pulp, so the sauce thickens. Stopping early leaves it thin and more likely to spoil in storage.

Swap the cinnamon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, mustard, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonfits better
  2. Dillfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Cinnamonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, mustard, vinegar. 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.

More tomato ketchup recipes

Green 26 See all 523 →

You might also like

Mixed MustardMixed Mustard9 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes