Skip to main content
Sauce

Tomato Mustard

A tomato-based sauce flavored with mustard, peppers, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Tomato Mustard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Peel the tomatoes and boil them with the red peppers for 1 hour.

  2. Add the black pepper, ginger, allspice, mace, cloves, garlic, and onions.

  3. Boil for another hour.

Finish the sauce

  1. Strain the sauce through a colander and let it cool.

  2. Stir in the mustard and vinegar after cooling.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the bulk of the sauce and provide its body and acidity.
Mustard
Adds sharp pungency that gives the sauce its characteristic bite.
Red peppers
Contribute sweetness and flavour to the base as they cook down.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavour and helps preserve the sauce.
Onions
Add savoury depth and body as they soften during the long boil.

The step that matters

Stir in the mustard and vinegar after cooling. Mustard's pungent compounds fade and turn harsh or bitter when heated for long, and vinegar's sharpness dulls under prolonged cooking. Adding them after the sauce has cooled keeps their bite and flavour fresh.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, mustard, pepper, ginger, allspice, clove, garlic):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, mustard, pepper, ginger, allspice, clove, garlic. 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.

You might also like

Ginger SauceGinger Sauce12 recipesMixed MustardMixed Mustard9 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipes