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Sauce

Tomato Catsup

A preserved tomato sauce made with tomatoes, cloves, pepper, nutmegs, wine, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Pour boiling water over the tomatoes and let them sit until the skins can be rubbed off.

  2. Cover the peeled tomatoes with coarse sea salt and let them stand for 24 hours.

  3. Strain the tomatoes.

Season and cook

  1. Add 3 ounces of cloves, 2 ounces of pepper, and 2 nutmegs to the mixture.

  2. Boil for half an hour.

  3. Add 1 pint of wine.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,759 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
Form the body and bulk of the ketchup.
Cloves
Add warm, aromatic spice flavour.
Pepper
Adds sharp, pungent heat to the seasoning.
Nutmegs
Add warm, sweet aromatic flavour.
Wine
Adds acidity and depth to the sauce.

The step that matters

Salting the peeled tomatoes for 24 hours. Salt draws water out of the tomatoes through osmosis, so the pulp loses moisture and concentrates. Leaving it too briefly or skipping it leaves a thinner ketchup that takes longer to reduce.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, pepper, nutmeg, wine):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, pepper, nutmeg, wine. 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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