Skip to main content
Sauce

Green Tomato Sauce

A sauce made from green tomatoes, cabbage, green peppers, salt, turmeric, mustard seed, brown sugar, vinegar, and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 ↓

Green Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Chop the green tomatoes, cabbage, and green peppers finely.

  2. Mix with the handful of salt and let stand overnight.

  3. Press all the juice from the mixture.

Cook the sauce

  1. Add turmeric, white mustard seed, brown sugar, vinegar, and grated horseradish.

  2. Boil until the tomatoes are tender, about one hour.

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. Cabbage + horseradishtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together481 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turmeric + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,279 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Turmeric + horseradishtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together437 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cabbage + mustardtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,645 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Form the bulk of the sauce and break down into a soft, thick texture when cooked.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sharp acidity of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavor and helps preserve the sauce.
Cabbage
Adds bulk and body, softening as it cooks into the sauce.
Coarse sea salt
Draws juice out of the chopped vegetables, reducing their water before cooking.

The step that matters

Pressing out the juice. Salting draws water from the chopped vegetables, and leaving that liquid in would thin the sauce and dilute its flavor. Pressing it all out before cooking keeps the final texture thick.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against cabbage, pepper, turmeric, mustard, sugar, vinegar, horseradish. 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

Mixed MustardMixed Mustard9 recipesHorseradish Cream SauceHorseradish Cream Sauce6 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipes