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Tomato Catsup

A thick tomato sauce made by cooking tomatoes with vinegar, spices, and salt, then strained and bottled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Wash the tomatoes and place them in a pan.

  2. Scald and skin the tomatoes, then cook until soft.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine wire sieve.

Season and cook

  1. Add vinegar, Cayenne pepper, black pepper, coarse sea salt, garlic, allspice, and cloves.

  2. Tie each spice in a separate cheesecloth bag.

  3. Boil for three hours, stirring constantly to prevent scorching.

  4. Remove the spice bags, bottle the catsup, cork tightly, and seal with wax.

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. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 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

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the ketchup, with their pulp and juice forming the body of the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the finished sauce.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and savoury depth that mellows during the long simmer.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the sauce and helps draw moisture out of the tomatoes during cooking.

The step that matters

Stirring during the three-hour boil. The thick, sugar-free tomato mixture sits on the hot pan base and can scorch easily over a long boil. Constant stirring spreads heat evenly and keeps the sauce from burning and tasting bitter.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, pepper, garlic, 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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