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Chili Sauce

A spicy tomato-based sauce with vinegar, spices, onions, celery, horseradish, sugar, and red peppers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Chili Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the ripe tomatoes for one hour.

  2. Add the salt, vinegar, cloves, cinnamon, allspice, ground mustard, sliced onions, celery, horseradish, sugar, and red peppers.

  3. Stir well and simmer for an additional hour.

  4. Bottle the sauce while hot.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  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

Ripe tomatoes
Break down during long boiling to form the body of the sauce.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that sharpens flavor and helps preserve the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity of the vinegar and tomatoes.
Onions
Contribute savory depth and aroma as they soften during simmering.
Red peppers
Add sweet, fresh pepper flavor and some body to the sauce.
Sea salt
Seasons the sauce and draws out moisture to aid thickening.

The step that matters

Simmer for an additional hour after adding the spices and vegetables. Long simmering lets the tomatoes and onions break down and thicken while the spices infuse. Too short a simmer leaves the sauce thin and the flavors raw; scorching on the bottom of the pot is a risk with long cooking.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, vinegar, clove, cinnamon, allspice, mustard, celery. 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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Tomato 14Green Tomato 4Raw 3Sweet 3 See all 392 →

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