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Sauce

Tomato Butter

A sweet, spiced tomato and apple sauce made by simmering tomatoes, apples, sugar, and spices for many hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove 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 ↓

Tomato Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the base

  1. Boil the tomatoes in a large pot.

  2. Peel and core the apples, then add them to the pot.

  3. Cook the mixture carefully for about 18 hours.

Sweeten and spice

  1. Add the brown sugar and boil until the juice is cooked out.

  2. One hour before finishing, add the cinnamon, allspice, and cloves.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 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. Apple + cinnamontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,598 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Apple + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 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 and supply moisture and tartness that cooks down into a thick base.
Apples
Add natural pectin that helps the sauce thicken and gives it body as it cooks.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the tomato's acidity while thickening the sauce.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, sweet aroma that gives the sauce its characteristic flavor.
Allspice
Adds warm, peppery aroma that deepens the spiced flavor of the sauce.
Cloves
Adds strong, pungent aroma that rounds out the spiced flavor of the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the spices one hour before finishing. Volatile aromatic compounds in cinnamon, allspice, and cloves fade during long cooking. Adding them late keeps more of their fragrance in the finished sauce.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, clove):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Arrowrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, sugar, cinnamon, allspice, clove. 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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