Name: Tomato Catsup
Ingredients: half a bushel of tomatoes; ½ cup coarse sea salt; 1 pint water; ½ ounce Cayenne pepper; 1 ounce cloves; 1 ounce nutmeg; 1 ounce mace; 1 quart white wine or vinegar

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

Cut the tomatoes in half and place them in a dish.
Sprinkle a little salt over them and let them stand for 3 to 4 hours.
Drain off the water and put the tomatoes into a preserving kettle with 1 pint of water.
Let them stew for 2 hours.
Strain the mixture through a colander and return it to the kettle.

Season and cook

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

Bottle

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.

Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together8,686 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Nutmeg + macetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together6,557 recipes

Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).
Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together17,451 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).
Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together8,400 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
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, body and tomato flavour of the ketchup as they break down.
White wine or vinegar: Adds acidity that gives the ketchup its tang and helps preserve it.
Cloves: Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavour.
Nutmeg: Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavour.
Mace: Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavour.

Swap the tomato

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

Carrotfits better
Capsicumfits better
Shallotfits better
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.