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Better Recipe for Tomato Catsup

A tomato catsup made by boiling tomatoes with salt, horseradish, onion, spices, vinegar, and wine, then straining and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Better Recipe for Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Slice the ripe tomatoes thinly.

  2. Layer the tomatoes and coarse sea salt alternately in a stone jar until full.

Cook and strain

  1. Gently boil the mixture for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

Season and finish

  1. For every gallon of strained mixture, add 4 roots of horseradish, 1 small onion with cloves, ¼ ounce mace, ¼ ounce cloves, ¼ ounce nutmeg, 1 ounce allspice, and 2 pods red pepper or 1 ounce black pepper.

  2. Boil all the ingredients together.

  3. Once done, add ½ pint of vinegar for every gallon of catsup and 1 pint of wine for every 3 quarts.

  4. Bottle the catsup as soon as it cools sufficiently and cork it tightly.

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  5. Horseradish + allspicetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 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

Ripe tomatoes
Form the body of the catsup, supplying the main flavour and bulk of the sauce.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the layered tomatoes and helps preserve the mixture.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent bite that cuts through the sweetness of the tomatoes.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps preserve the finished catsup.
Wine
Adds acidity and depth of flavour to the finished catsup.

The step that matters

Bottling while still warm. Corking the catsup before it has cooled sufficiently can build pressure and cause spoilage. Let it cool enough before bottling and sealing tightly.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (horseradish, onion, clove, mace, nutmeg, allspice, pepper):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against horseradish, onion, clove, mace, nutmeg, allspice, pepper. 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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