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Pepper Sauce

A sauce made from green peppers, onions, garlic, horseradish, cider vinegar, water, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Pepper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine green peppers, onions, garlic, horseradish, cider vinegar, and water in a kettle.

  2. Boil until soft enough to mash through a sieve with a spoon.

  3. Pass all spices through a sieve before adding to the peppers.

  4. Add black pepper, allspice, mace, cloves, and salt to the mixture.

  5. Boil for 10 minutes.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Horseradish + allspicetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Garlic + horseradishtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together719 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

What each ingredient does

Green peppers
Form the bulk of the sauce and soften into a mashable pulp when boiled.
Onions
Add body and savory sweetness as they soften into the sauce.
Cider vinegar
Provides acidity that gives the sauce its sharp flavor and helps preserve it.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent heat that fades somewhat with cooking.

The step that matters

Mash the peppers through a sieve while soft. Boiling until the peppers are fully soft lets them pass through the sieve smoothly. Under-cooked peppers stay fibrous and leave a coarse, uneven texture in the sauce.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Clovefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, onion, garlic, horseradish, cider, vinegar, allspice. 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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