Name: One Way to Make Tomato Catsup
Ingredients: tomatoes; coarse sea salt; sugar; cloves; pepper; mace; vinegar

Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

One Way to Make Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Slice the tomatoes and sprinkle them with coarse sea salt to extract the juice.
Stew the tomatoes down until quite thick.
Strain the mixture through a colander.
Add sugar, a few cloves, pepper, mace, and vinegar to taste.
Bottle the catsup and seal tightly with wax.

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.

Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,400 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,923 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + clovetop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together3,474 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).
Pepper + vinegartop 14% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together27,814 recipes

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

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

Swap the mace

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

Cinnamonfits better
Allspicefits better
Cardamomfits better
Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, sugar, clove, pepper, vinegar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.