Skip to main content
Sauce

Wild Plum Catsup

A sweet and tart plum-based condiment made with plums, sugar, vinegar, and spices.

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

Why it works: Cinnamon and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,917 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Wild Plum Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Boil, mash, and strain the plums.

  2. For every quart of juice, add slightly more than ½ cup of vinegar.

Season and cook

  1. Add cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg.

  2. Boil for 15 minutes.

Bottle

  1. Pour into 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. Cinnamon + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,917 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Plum + cinnamontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Plum + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together446 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Plums
Provides the fruit base, body, and most of the flavour of the ketchup.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps preserve the ketchup while it thickens as it cooks.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the ketchup.
Cinnamon
Adds warm spice aroma to the ketchup.

The step that matters

Boil for 15 minutes. Boiling concentrates the mixture and thickens it, so this step largely determines the ketchup's final consistency. Stopping early leaves it thinner.

Swap the plum

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Plumthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, nutmeg. 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes