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Sauce

Currant Catsup

A sweet and spicy currant sauce made with currant juice, sugar, spices, salt, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove 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 ↓

Currant Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil 6 quarts of currant juice until it reduces by half.

  2. Add 2 pounds of sugar, 2 ounces of cinnamon, 2 teaspoons of pepper, 1 teaspoon of mustard, 1 teaspoon of cloves and ½ teacup of coarse sea salt.

  3. Pour in 1 pint of vinegar.

  4. Stir and cook for 10 more minutes before removing from heat.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Cinnamon + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Mustard + clovetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,829 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Currant juice
Provides the fruit base and bulk liquid that reduces into the ketchup.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the reduced juice into a sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the sauce.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, sweet aroma and spice flavour.

The step that matters

Reducing the currant juice. Boiling until it reduces by half concentrates the juice's sugars and flavour and begins thickening it. Stopping too early leaves a thin sauce, while over-reducing can make it too thick or scorch on the bottom of the pot.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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