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Sauce

Sauce, Store, for Cold Meat or Fish

A preserved sauce made with garlic, mushroom ketchup, walnut ketchup, soy sauce, chili vinegar, and ordinary vinegar for cold meat or fish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Ketchup and sauce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Sauce, Store, for Cold Meat or Fish

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place sliced garlic in a quart bottle.

  2. Add mushroom ketchup, walnut ketchup, soy sauce, and chili vinegar.

Steep

  1. Lay the bottle on its side and shake it frequently for six days.

  2. On the seventh day, fill the bottle with good ordinary vinegar.

  3. After ten days, strain the sauce into small bottles.

  4. Cork the bottles tightly and store 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. Ketchup + saucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Garlic + mushroomtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,700 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Clove + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Clove + mushroomtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,663 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Mushroom ketchup
Provides concentrated savoury, umami flavour as the base of the sauce.
Walnut ketchup
Adds deep, dark, savoury flavour to the sauce.
Soy sauce
Adds salty, savoury depth that rounds out the other ketchups.
Chili vinegar
Supplies acidity and heat, and helps extract flavour from the garlic during steeping.

The step that matters

Shaking the bottle over six days. Frequent shaking keeps the garlic and liquids mixed so flavour is extracted evenly. Without it, the steeping is uneven and the sauce may taste patchy.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, garlic, mushroom, ketchup, sauce, vinegar):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Sesamefits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, garlic, mushroom, ketchup, sauce, 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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