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Chow Chow Dressing

A thick, tangy dressing made from garlic, onions, tamarind, tomatoes, apple pulp, peppers, soy sauce, sugar, mustard paste, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 15 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Chow Chow Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Combine garlic, onions, tamarinds, lemon juice, tomatoes, apple pulp, red bell peppers, soy sauce, sugar, and water in a large kettle and cook slowly for 20 minutes.

Make the mustard paste and combine

  1. Mix dry mustard flour and wheat flour with vinegar in a separate container to create a thin paste.

  2. Add the mustard paste to the kettle mixture, passing it through a fine sieve to remove lumps.

Finish the dressing

  1. Cook the dressing until it reaches the density of ketchup.

  2. Run the dressing through a ketchup finishing machine.

  3. If the dressing is too thick, thin it with additional vinegar before serving.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Tamarind + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together137 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 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

Dry mustard flour
Thickens the dressing and adds sharp mustard flavor.
Wheat flour
Adds body and helps the dressing thicken as it cooks.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that brightens the sauce and thins it when needed.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of vinegar and tamarind.
Tamarinds
Contribute tartness and a fruity sourness to the sauce.
Tomatoes
Supply moisture and body as the base of the dressing.

The step that matters

Sieve the mustard paste into the kettle. Flour forms lumps that will not dissolve fully during cooking. Making the paste smooth and passing it through a fine sieve keeps the dressing uniformly textured instead of grainy.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (garlic, onion, tamarind, lemon, tomato, pepper, sauce):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against garlic, onion, tamarind, lemon, tomato, pepper, sauce. 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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