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Sauce

Cold Catsup

A cold tomato-based sauce made with tomatoes, horseradish, salt, mustard seed, peppers, celery, onions, sugar, black pepper, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Cold Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the tomatoes and drain them through a sieve until quite dry.

Combine and mix

  1. Add the grated horseradish, coarse sea salt, mustard seed, chopped peppers, chopped celery, chopped onions, sugar, black pepper, and vinegar, then mix well.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  5. Mustard + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the bulk and body of the ketchup.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and softens the sharpness of the vinegar.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent heat when the root is grated.
Mustard seed
Adds a sharp, pungent bite and a bit of texture.

The step that matters

Drain the tomatoes until quite dry. Tomatoes release a lot of watery juice. Since this ketchup is never cooked to reduce it, excess liquid would thin the sauce and dilute its flavour, so draining well keeps it thick and concentrated.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Broccolifits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against horseradish, mustard, pepper, celery, onion, 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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