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Spiced Sauce

A fermented sauce made with cloves, anchovy paste, cayenne, walnut and tomato ketchup, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Anchovy and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 479 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Spiced Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a bowl, combine ground cloves, anchovy paste, cayenne pepper, walnut ketchup, and tomato ketchup.

  2. Add white wine vinegar and mix well.

Cook and rest

  1. Transfer the mixture to an earthen jar, cover it, and place it in a saucepan with water.

  2. Bring to a boil and let it simmer for 2 hours.

  3. Remove the jar and let it sit for a week.

Finish and bottle

  1. After a week, filter the sauce and bottle it, corking 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. Anchovy + ketchuptop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together479 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  4. Clove + walnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,592 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. White wine + vinegartop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,776 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Anchovy paste
Adds deep savory saltiness that rounds out the sauce's flavour.
Walnut ketchup
Contributes a dark, savoury, concentrated flavour base.
Tomato ketchup
Adds sweetness and acidity to balance the spices.
White wine vinegar
Provides acidity that preserves the sauce and extracts flavours from the spices.

The step that matters

Simmering the sealed jar. Heating the jar in water gently extracts flavour without boiling the contents hard. Vigorous boiling could drive off vinegar and concentrate the sauce unevenly, so keep the water at a steady simmer and check that the jar stays covered.

Swap the walnut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, anchovy, pepper, ketchup, tomato, white wine, vinegar):

  1. Beansfits better
  2. Walnutthe original
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Chickpeafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, anchovy, pepper, ketchup, tomato, white 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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