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Gooseberry Catsup

A preserved sauce made from boiled gooseberries, sugar, vinegar, and spices.

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 ↓

Gooseberry Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the gooseberries, coffee sugar, and vinegar together for 1.5 hours.

  2. Add the cinnamon, allspice, and cloves, then boil for an additional 30 minutes.

  3. Pour into jars and seal.

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. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Coffee + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together895 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-methoxybenzaldehyde (sweet, anise).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Gooseberries
Provide the main fruit body and tartness that the ketchup is built around.
Coffee sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the ketchup as it cooks down.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the ketchup.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma and sweet spice flavour.
Allspice
Adds warm, pungent aroma and spice flavour.
Cloves
Adds strong aromatic spice flavour in small amounts.

The step that matters

Long simmer before adding spices. Boiling the gooseberries, sugar and vinegar for a full 1.5 hours lets the fruit break down and the mixture thicken. Spices added later keep their aroma, since long cooking can dull volatile flavour compounds.

Swap the allspice

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

  1. Allspicethe original
  2. Nutmegfits about as well
  3. Cardamomfits about as well
  4. Gingerfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against coffee, sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, 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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