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Sauce

Green Tomato Catsup

A thick, spicy sauce made from green tomatoes, onions, peppers, and spices, boiled for hours.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon 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 ↓

Green Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the green tomatoes, cabbage, onions, and red peppers finely.

  2. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt and let stand overnight.

Cook

  1. Drain the mixture, then add the spices and brown sugar.

  2. Boil slowly for 4 hours until thick and smooth.

Store

  1. Store in bottles.

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 + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Cinnamon + horseradishtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together515 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Form the bulk of the ketchup and break down into a thick, smooth body.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps give the long-cooked sauce its rich, dark body.
Red peppers
Add sharp flavour and heat that balance the sweetness.
Cinnamon
Contributes warm aromatic spice that carries through the long simmer.

The step that matters

Boil slowly for 4 hours. Slow simmering evaporates water gradually, concentrating flavour and thickening the sauce without scorching the sugars. A hard, fast boil can burn the bottom and leave the texture uneven.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, ginger, clove, sugar, cinnamon, horseradish):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, ginger, clove, sugar, cinnamon, horseradish. 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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