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Sauce

Tomato Mustard

A preserved tomato and mustard sauce seasoned with cayenne, black pepper, cloves, and salt, bottled after boiling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Tomato Mustard

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cut the tomatoes into small pieces and boil until tender.

  2. Rub the tomatoes through a sieve and boil until nearly dry.

  3. Add the spices and boil a little longer.

  4. If not salty enough, add more salt before the last boiling.

Bottle

  1. Add 1 tablespoon of sweet oil on top of the mustard before corking to exclude air.

  2. When cold, bottle and cork tightly.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Clove + mustardtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,829 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  4. Pepper + mustardtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Mustard + tomatotop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,482 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

Tomatoes
Form the bulk of the sauce; boiling and sieving reduce them to a thick, concentrated base.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour that carries through the long boil.
Sweet oil
Forms a layer over the sauce that helps exclude air before corking.
Cayenne pepper
Adds heat that deepens as the sauce cooks down.

The step that matters

Boil until nearly dry. Sieved tomatoes contain a lot of water. Reducing them until nearly dry concentrates flavour and gives the sauce a thick body; stopping too early leaves it thin and more prone to spoiling in the bottle.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, clove, 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.

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