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Sauce

Oude Sauce

A pickled sauce made from green tomatoes, peppers, onions, salt, sugar, horseradish, cloves, cinnamon, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon 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 ↓

Oude Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the green tomatoes, peppers, and onions together.

  2. Add the coarse sea salt and let it stand overnight.

  3. In the morning, drain off the water.

Cook

  1. Add the sugar, horseradish, ground cloves, and cinnamon.

  2. Cover with vinegar and stew gently all day.

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 + cinnamontop 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. Horseradish + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together515 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Horseradish + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,245 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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 supply its tart, fresh-vegetable body.
Onions
Add savory depth and body as they soften during the long stew.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the vegetables, concentrating flavor and firming their texture.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar and green tomatoes and helps the sauce thicken and caramelize slightly.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that sharpens flavor and helps preserve the sauce.
Horseradish
Contributes a pungent heat that mellows during slow cooking.

The step that matters

Draining after the overnight salting. Salt pulls water out of the vegetables overnight. Draining off that liquid before adding vinegar keeps the sauce concentrated and prevents it from becoming thin and overly diluted during the long stew.

Swap the onion

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

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

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