Skip to main content
Sauce

Hot Sauce for Meats

A sweet and spicy sauce made from onions, tomatoes, vinegar, peppers, and spices, suitable for meats.

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

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove 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 ↓

Hot Sauce for Meats

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a large pot, combine onions, sugar, tomatoes, vinegar, peppers, salt, cinnamon, cloves, and red pepper.

  2. Cook the mixture over medium heat until it thickens.

Finish and bottle

  1. Strain the sauce to remove solids.

  2. Bottle the hot sauce and seal.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  4. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  5. Pepper + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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 sauce and provide its body and acidity as they cook down.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and bulk that softens and thickens during cooking.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that gives the sauce its tang and helps preserve it.
Sugar
Balances the acidity and spice with sweetness and helps the sauce thicken as it reduces.
Peppers
Supply the main heat and pepper flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook until it thickens. Cooking over medium heat lets water evaporate and the tomatoes and onions break down, so the sauce reaches a thick consistency. Stopping too early leaves it thin and watery, while overcooking can scorch the sugar on the bottom of the pot.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, tomato, vinegar, pepper, cinnamon, clove):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Cucumberfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, tomato, vinegar, pepper, cinnamon, clove. 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

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes