Skip to main content
Sauce

Pontac-Ketchup

A fermented elderberry sauce made with vinegar, spices, shallots, anchovies, and aged in bottles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and mace are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

Pontac-Ketchup

Ingredients

Directions

Steep and strain

  1. Place elderberries in a stone jar and cover with strong vinegar.

  2. Bake with bread.

  3. While hot, strain the mixture.

Boil and flavour

  1. Boil the strained liquid with cloves, mace, peppercorns, and shallots until flavorful.

  2. Add anchovies to the boiled liquid and stir until dissolved.

Bottle

  1. Once cooled, pour into pint bottles 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. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Vinegar + clovetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together10,386 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Vinegar + macetop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,415 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Elderberries
Provide the fruity base, colour and body of the ketchup.
Strong vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that brightens flavour and helps preserve the mixture.
Anchovies
Dissolve into the liquid to add savoury depth.
Shallots (in the method)
Add mild aromatic sweetness and savoury background when boiled.

The step that matters

Dissolving the anchovies. Anchovies must be stirred into the hot, boiled liquid until fully dissolved. Fully melted anchovies blend into a smooth savoury base, while undissolved pieces leave gritty bits and uneven flavour.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, 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