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Tomato Catsup

A preserved tomato sauce seasoned with salt, spices, and wine or vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Cut the tomatoes in half and place them in a dish.

  2. Sprinkle a little salt over the tomatoes and let them stand for 3 to 4 hours.

  3. Drain off the water and place the tomatoes in a preserving kettle with 1 pint of water.

Cook and season

  1. Stew the tomatoes for 2 hours.

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

  3. Add ½ cup of coarse sea salt, ½ teaspoon of Cayenne pepper, 1 ounce of cloves, 1 ounce of nutmeg, 1 ounce of mace, and 1 quart of white wine or vinegar.

  4. Boil the mixture for 1 hour.

Bottle

  1. When cool, bottle it and seal 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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + nutmegtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together13,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the sauce, along with the body and flavour that the ketchup is built on.
White wine or vinegar
Adds acidity, which sharpens the flavour and helps keep the finished sauce stable.
Cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavour during the long boil.
Nutmeg
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavour to the sauce.
Mace
Contributes a warm, aromatic spice flavour similar to nutmeg.

The step that matters

Sealing the bottles tightly once cool. The sauce is acidic and cooked, but it is still a moist food that can spoil if air and microbes get in. Letting it cool before bottling avoids heat damage to the seal and keeps the bottle airtight during storage.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, clove, nutmeg, mace, white wine):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, clove, nutmeg, mace, white wine. 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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