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Pepper Sauce

A sauce made from ground green and sweet red peppers, onions, vinegar, sugar, salt, and cayenne pepper, boiled and bottled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and onion are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 68,474 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Pepper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the seeds from the green and sweet red peppers.

  2. Grind the peppers and onions together using a meat grinder.

Scald and drain

  1. Pour boiling water over the mixture and let it scald, then drain it.

  2. Scald it again with hot vinegar, then drain off the vinegar.

Season and bottle

  1. Add 1 pint of cold vinegar, sugar, salt, and cayenne pepper, bring to a boil, and bottle while hot.

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. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  2. Onion + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,226 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Pepper + sugartop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Green peppers
Provides bulk and fresh, vegetable flavor, with moisture that becomes part of the sauce.
Sweet red peppers
Adds bulk, mild sweetness, and fresh vegetable flavor to the sauce.
Onions
Adds savory aroma and body once ground into the mixture.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that gives the sauce its tang and helps preserve it.
Sugar
Balances the sharpness of the vinegar with sweetness.

The step that matters

Bottle while hot. Keeping the sauce hot when it goes into bottles helps drive out air and keeps it safe to store. Acidic vinegar also helps inhibit spoilage, so the sauce stays stable once sealed.

Swap the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, sugar, 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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