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Tomato Catsup

A tomato-based sauce made with ginger, cloves, cinnamon, mace, mustard, red pepper, sea salt, and cider vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Peel, steam, and strain the tomatoes.

  2. Boil the strained tomatoes down.

Season and bottle

  1. Add ginger, cloves, cinnamon, mace, mustard, red pepper, coarse sea salt, and cider vinegar. Mix well and boil for a few minutes.

  2. Bottle the catsup and seal tightly.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the bulk of the ketchup and, once boiled down, the thick body of the sauce.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the ketchup its tang and helps preserve it.
Cinnamon
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavour to the sauce.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the sauce and adds savoury depth to the tomatoes.

The step that matters

Boil the strained tomatoes down. Tomatoes are mostly water, so they must reduce long enough to thicken into a concentrated base. Adding vinegar and spices too early or stopping early leaves the ketchup thin and watery.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, ginger, clove, cinnamon, mustard, pepper, cider):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, ginger, clove, cinnamon, mustard, pepper, cider. 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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