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Sauce

Governor's Sauce

A spicy tomato-based sauce with peppers, horseradish, mustard, and sugar, seasoned with coarse sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Horseradish and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Governor's Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Slice the tomatoes and sprinkle with 1 cup coarse sea salt.

  2. Let sit overnight.

  3. In the morning, drain the tomatoes well.

Cook the sauce

  1. Combine the tomatoes, peppers, horseradish, cayenne, black pepper, mustard, and sugar in a pot.

  2. Simmer all ingredients together until cooked through.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + horseradishtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,646 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Mustard + tomatotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,482 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Salting draws out their water, and draining them well keeps the sauce from becoming thin.
Peppers
Provide the main body and pepper flavor of the sauce.
Horseradish
Adds sharp, pungent heat that stays after cooking.
Sugar
Balances the heat and acidity with a touch of sweetness.

The step that matters

Draining the salted tomatoes. Salt pulls water out of the tomatoes overnight. If they are not drained well, the excess liquid dilutes the sauce and lengthens the simmer needed to thicken it.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, horseradish, mustard, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, horseradish, mustard, sugar. 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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