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Sauce

Catsup, Tomato

A preserved tomato sauce made with tomatoes, peppers, onions, spices, sugar, mustard, and vinegar, simmered for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Catsup, Tomato

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

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

  2. Boil the chopped ingredients together.

  3. Strain the mixture.

Cook the ketchup

  1. Add allspice, cinnamon, salt, sugar, mustard, and vinegar to the strained mixture.

  2. Cook slowly for 2.5 hours.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main body, acidity and flavour of the ketchup base.
Onions
Add savoury depth and aroma as they soften during boiling.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the acidity of the tomatoes and vinegar.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the ketchup.

The step that matters

Cook slowly for 2.5 hours. Long, gentle cooking evaporates water and thickens the tomato mixture into a spreadable ketchup. Too fast a boil can scorch the sugars and tomato solids on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

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