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Cold Tomato Catsup

A cold tomato sauce made with tomatoes, salt, mustard seed, peppers, vinegar, horseradish, nasturtiums, and celery seed.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cold Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Run the tomatoes through a sieve.

Combine and bottle

  1. Combine the tomatoes with salt, mustard seed, red peppers, pepper, vinegar, horseradish, nasturtiums, and celery seed. Do not cook the mixture.

  2. Seal tightly 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 + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Horseradish + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together835 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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, moisture and tomato flavor of the ketchup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavor and helps preserve the uncooked sauce.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the sauce and draws out flavor while helping preserve it.
Mustard seed
Contributes sharp, pungent flavor that balances the sweetness of the tomatoes.

The step that matters

Do not cook the mixture. Without heat, the sauce stays raw, so its flavor is sharper and fresher, and it depends on acidity and salt for preservation. Sealing it tightly keeps air and microbes out, so the bottles must be kept clean and closed.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Lettucefits better
  2. Broccolifits better
  3. Radishfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

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