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Tomato Catsup

A preserved tomato sauce made by boiling tomatoes with spices, sugar, vinegar, and salt, then straining and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove 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 ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Cut the tomatoes in half.

  2. Pour hot water over the tomatoes and add peach leaves and onions.

  3. Boil for 1 hour until tomatoes are soft.

  4. Strain the mixture and return the liquid to the boiler.

Season and cook down

  1. Add allspice, ground pepper, mustard, cloves, nutmegs, brown sugar, vinegar, and salt.

  2. Mix well and boil for 2 hours, stirring to prevent burning.

  3. If not thick enough, cook longer.

  4. Strain and seal in small bottles.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + nutmegtop 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. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main body and flavour of the ketchup once boiled down.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sharpness of the vinegar.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the ketchup its tang and helps preserve it.
Onions
Add savoury depth and aroma to the cooked tomato base.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that rounds out the spiced sauce.

The step that matters

Boil for 2 hours while stirring. Constant stirring keeps the sugars and solids from scorching on the bottom of the pan, and long simmering thickens the sauce by evaporating water. Skipping the stirring can leave a burnt taste.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, onion, allspice, pepper, mustard, clove, nutmeg. 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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