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Tomato Catsup

A preserved tomato condiment made by boiling tomatoes, straining, and simmering with vinegar, salt, spices, and onions.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Boil the tomatoes until perfectly soft, cutting them into small pieces.

  2. Squeeze them through a fine wire sieve, scraping all the pulp from the underside while keeping out the seeds.

Make the ketchup

  1. Add vinegar, salt, cloves, allspice, cinnamon, mace, red pepper, black pepper, onions, and celery seed.

  2. Boil until reduced by half.

  3. Remove the spices before bottling to avoid bitterness.

  4. Bottle the catsup when completely cold.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the main body, pulp and flavour of the ketchup.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavour and helps preserve the ketchup.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the sauce and draws out flavour from the tomatoes.
Onions
Add savoury aromatic depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Remove the spices before bottling. Spices such as cloves and allspice keep releasing bitter, harsh compounds the longer they sit in hot liquid, so leaving them in too long can make the ketchup bitter.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, vinegar, clove, allspice, cinnamon, pepper, onion. 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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