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Tomato Catsup

A preserved tomato sauce made with spices, vinegar, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Mustard and horseradish match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,832 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Break the tomatoes into pieces.

  2. Layer tomatoes and salt in a container and let them stand overnight.

Make the ketchup

  1. Mix in cassia, cinnamon, cloves, mustard seed, cayenne pepper, horseradish, and onions.

  2. Boil the mixture until quite dry.

  3. Sift the mixture and add cider vinegar.

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. Mustard + horseradishtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Cassia + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together116 recipes

    Shared aroma: cinnamyl acetate (sweet aromatic, cinnamon).

  4. Cassia + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together194 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the bulk of the ketchup and supply its body and tomato flavour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws water out of the tomatoes and helps preserve the mixture.
Onions
Add savoury depth and aroma to the sauce as it cooks down.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and helps keep the ketchup stable.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until quite dry. Long boiling evaporates water and concentrates the sugars and solids, so the ketchup thickens. Stopping too early leaves it thin and watery, and it may spoil sooner.

Swap the cassia

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, cinnamon, clove, mustard, pepper, horseradish, onion):

  1. Allspicefits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Cassiathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, cinnamon, clove, mustard, pepper, horseradish, onion. 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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