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Tomato Catsup

A preserved tomato sauce made by boiling tomatoes, seasoning, and adding vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the tomatoes for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the pulp through a sieve and return it to the kettle.

  3. Add salt, mace, cloves, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and ground mustard.

  4. Boil slowly for 4 hours.

  5. Once cooled, add vinegar and bottle the catsup.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  4. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Clove + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,829 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the pulp, which cooks down into the body of the ketchup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the ketchup its tang and helps preserve it.
Ground mustard
Adds pungent, sharp flavour that balances the sweetness of the tomatoes.
Ground cloves
Contributes warm, aromatic spice notes to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for 4 hours. A long, gentle simmer evaporates water and concentrates the tomato pulp, thickening the sauce and deepening its flavour. Boiling too hard can scorch the bottom of the kettle.

Swap the mace

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, clove, pepper, mustard, 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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