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Cherry Catsup

Cherry catsup is a sweet and spicy cherry ketchup made by boiling cherry juice, sugar, cloves, cinnamon, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Cherry Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine cherry juice and sugar in a saucepan.

  2. Add cloves, cinnamon, and cayenne pepper.

  3. Boil the mixture until it thickens into a syrup.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the syrup for later use.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Cherry + cinnamontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together551 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  4. Cherry + clovetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Cherry + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,336 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Cherry juice
Provides the liquid base and the main fruit flavour that the syrup reduces to.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and thickens it as water evaporates during boiling.

The step that matters

Boil until it thickens into a syrup. As water evaporates, sugar concentrates and the liquid thickens. Stopping too early leaves a thin, runny syrup, while boiling too long makes it stiff and can scorch the sugar on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the cherry

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits about as well
  3. Orangefits about as well
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, clove, cinnamon, 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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