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Sauce

Tomato Mustard

A spicy tomato and pepper sauce with mustard, curry powder, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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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 tomato base

  1. Slice and boil the tomatoes and red peppers for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the mixture through a colander and boil again for 1 hour with black pepper, ginger, allspice, cloves, mace, and coarse sea salt.

Finish

  1. Once cooled, add mustard, curry powder, and vinegar.

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

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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, providing body, moisture, and tangy sweetness as they cook down.
Mustard
Adds sharp pungency and a bite that balances the sweetness of the cooked tomatoes.
Curry powder
Contributes warm aromatic spice notes that build flavour during the long simmer.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and helps preserve it.
Red peppers
Add sweetness and vegetal body that thickens the mixture as it boils down.

The step that matters

Adding the mustard, curry powder, and vinegar after cooling. Mustard's pungency and vinegar's acidity are volatile and fade with prolonged heat, so adding them once the mixture has cooled keeps their sharp flavour intact.

Swap the mace

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

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

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