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Elderberry Ketchup, for Fish Sauce

A condiment made from elderberries, vinegar, and spices, boiled and bottled as a ketchup for use as fish sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Elderberry Ketchup, for Fish Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the berries

  1. Pick the elderberries from the stalks and place them in an earthen jar.

  2. Pour boiling vinegar over the berries and let them sit in a cool oven overnight.

  3. Strain the liquid from the berries without squeezing them.

Make the ketchup

  1. In a saucepan, combine the strained liquid with shallots, mace, ginger, cloves, and peppercorns.

  2. Boil for 6 to 8 minutes, then let it cool.

  3. Bottle the ketchup with the spices.

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. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Shallot + gingertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together565 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Mace + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,152 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Elderberries
Provide the main fruity flavour and the deep colour of the ketchup.
Vinegar
Extracts flavour from the berries and gives the ketchup its sharp acidity.
Shallots
Add a mild savoury onion flavour that rounds out the sauce.

The step that matters

Straining without squeezing. Squeezing the berries forces solids and bitter pulp into the liquid, which can make the ketchup cloudy and harsher in taste. Letting the liquid drain on its own keeps the final sauce clearer and smoother.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, shallot, ginger, clove):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Cinnamonfits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, shallot, ginger, clove. 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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