Skip to main content
Sauce

Tomato Mustard

A preserved tomato sauce thickened with mustard flour and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and allspice 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 Mustard

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil tomatoes and salt in a preserving pan for 30 minutes.

  2. Pulp the mixture through a colander and return it to the kettle.

  3. Add cloves, allspice, black pepper, ginger, cayenne, garlic, onion, and curry powder.

  4. Boil down the mixture until it thickens, then strain through a sieve.

  5. Add mustard flour until the desired thickness is reached and simmer briefly.

  6. Bottle the mixture 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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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, providing body, moisture and tangy acidity once cooked down.
Mustard flour
Thickens the sauce and adds sharp mustard flavour as it is stirred in.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture from the tomatoes and seasons the sauce as it boils.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aromatic depth to the base.

The step that matters

Boil down the mixture until it thickens. Reducing by evaporation concentrates flavour and sets the body of the sauce. Stopping too early leaves it thin, while overcooking can scorch the bottom of the pan and turn the sauce bitter.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, allspice, pepper, ginger, garlic, onion, mustard. 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.

You might also like

Ginger SauceGinger Sauce12 recipesMixed MustardMixed Mustard9 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipes