Skip to main content
Sauce

Tomato Catsup

A preserved tomato sauce made with tomatoes, onions, spices, sugar, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Allspice and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,331 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the ketchup

  1. Slice and cook the ripe tomatoes until soft enough to pass through a sieve.

  2. To the pulp and juice, add the chopped onion, black pepper, red pepper, ground ginger and mustard, celery seed, mixed spices, cloves, sugar, and salt.

  3. Cook the mixture for 2 hours, or longer if it is not thick enough.

  4. Ensure the mixture is not thin or watery.

Bottle

  1. Bottle and seal while hot; it will keep for 2 years in a good cellar.

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 + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe tomatoes
Form the main body and liquid, which thickens into a sauce as it cooks down.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the tomatoes and vinegar.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps keep the ketchup stable.
Chopped onion
Adds savoury depth and body as it softens during cooking.

The step that matters

Cooking until thick. Cooking until thick is the step most likely to go wrong. Tomato pulp holds a lot of water, and the sauce thickens only as that water evaporates during the long simmer. Stopping early leaves it thin and watery, so check the texture before bottling.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, ginger, mustard, celery, allspice, nutmeg):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, ginger, mustard, celery, allspice, 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.

More tomato ketchup recipes

Green 26 See all 523 →

You might also like

Cider SauceCider Sauce15 recipesGinger SauceGinger Sauce12 recipesMixed MustardMixed Mustard9 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipes