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Sauce

Tomato Catsup

A thick tomato sauce made by boiling onions and tomatoes, spiced with cloves, celery seed, cayenne pepper, and sweetened with brown sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper 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 Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomato base

  1. Boil the onions and tomatoes until thoroughly cooked.

  2. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

Season and cook

  1. Tie the spices in a bag and add to the tomato juice along with salt, pepper, sugar, and vinegar.

  2. Cook the mixture until it thickens.

Finish

  1. Just before bottling, add the sherry wine.

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 + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  3. Clove + celerytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,668 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  4. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 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

Onions
Provide the savory base and body that thickens the cooked sauce.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the tomatoes and vinegar.
Sherry wine
Adds aroma and a mellow acidic note at the end.
Celery seed
Adds a warm, aromatic flavour that carries through the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook until it thickens. Long simmering lets water evaporate, concentrating the tomato solids so the sauce sets to a ketchup texture. Stopping early leaves it thin and watery, which can also make it spoil sooner once bottled.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, sugar, celery, pepper, sherry, wine, vinegar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, sugar, celery, pepper, sherry, wine, vinegar. 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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