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Tomato Catsup

A thick tomato sauce made by boiling tomatoes, spices, vinegar, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomato juice

  1. Mash ripe tomatoes by hand to extract all the juice.

  2. Bring the juice to a boil and strain it through a sieve.

Make the ketchup

  1. Add salt, black pepper, mustard, cayenne pepper, allspice, and cloves in a bag to the juice.

  2. Stir in cider vinegar and brown sugar.

  3. Boil down the mixture until it thickens and becomes smooth.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  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

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the juice and bulk that form the ketchup base.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the acidity of the vinegar.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavor and helps preserve the ketchup.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavor that complements the tomato and spices.

The step that matters

Boil down the mixture until it thickens. Tomato juice is mostly water, so it must reduce long enough for the solids to concentrate and the sauce to turn thick and smooth. Stopping early leaves it thin, while overcooking can scorch the sugars on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, mustard, allspice, clove, cider, vinegar, sugar):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, mustard, allspice, clove, cider, vinegar, sugar. 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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