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Tomato Paste

A thick tomato paste made by boiling tomatoes, spices, onion, and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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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 ↓

Tomato Paste

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tomato base

  1. Boil the tomatoes with salt until they pass easily through a sieve.

  2. Strain the mixture and return the strained mixture to the kettle.

Season and thicken

  1. Add ground cloves, cayenne pepper, curry powder, and finely chopped onion.

  2. Boil until thick, then add mustard to form a paste.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Clove + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,829 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 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

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the paste and, once boiled down, its body and concentrated tomato flavour.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aromatic depth as it cooks into the paste.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that gives the paste its characteristic bite.

The step that matters

Boil until thick. Water must evaporate for the mixture to concentrate into a paste. Stopping too early leaves it thin and watery, while boiling too long can scorch the sugars in the tomatoes and onion.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, pepper, onion, mustard. 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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