Skip to main content
Sauce

Currant Catsup

A sweet and tart sauce made from currants, sugar, vinegar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,536 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Currant Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine currants, sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, pepper, and allspice in a granite kettle.

  2. Boil until the mixture thickens enough to run freely from a spoon.

  3. Seal the catsup in jars.

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. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Currant + allspicetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,359 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl benzoate (fruity, sweet).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Currants
Provide the fruit base, tartness, and natural pectin that helps the sauce thicken.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, as it concentrates during boiling, helps the sauce thicken and preserve.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the catsup.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil until it thickens. Boiling drives off water so the sugar and currant pectin concentrate and the sauce thickens. Stopping too early leaves it thin, while boiling too long makes it stiff and sticky.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, pepper, allspice):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, pepper, 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.

You might also like

Currant Jelly SauceCurrant Jelly Sauce32 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes