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Sauce

Tomato Mustard

A preserved tomato sauce thickened with mustard flour and spiced with cloves, allspice, pepper, ginger, cayenne, garlic, onion, and curry powder.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice 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

  1. Boil the tomatoes and salt in a preserving pan for 30 minutes.

  2. Pulp the mixture through a colander and return it to the kettle.

  3. Add the cloves, allspice, black pepper, ginger, cayenne, garlic, onion, and curry powder.

  4. Boil down the mixture until it reduces significantly.

  5. Strain through a sieve and add mustard flour until the desired thickness is reached.

  6. Simmer for a short time, then bottle for use.

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 + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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 supply its body, acidity and sweetness as they cook down.
Mustard flour
Thickens the sauce and adds sharp mustard flavour.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aromatic depth as it softens into the base.

The step that matters

Boil down the mixture until it reduces significantly. Evaporating water concentrates the flavour and thickens the sauce. Stopping too early leaves it thin and watery, while over-reducing can make it too dense and salty, since the salt concentrates too.

Swap the tomato

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

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

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