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Sauce

Governor's Sauce

A tomato-based sauce made with green tomatoes, onions, peppers, ginger, spices, vinegar, mustard, brown sugar, and horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Governor's Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Slice the green tomatoes and sprinkle heavily with coarse sea salt, then let them stand overnight.

  2. Drain the tomatoes in the morning and cover them with vinegar.

Simmer

  1. Simmer the tomatoes with the onions, red peppers, ginger, black pepper, red pepper, mustard, brown sugar, and horseradish for a little over two hours.

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. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  3. Onion + horseradishtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,784 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  5. Vinegar + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Green tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the sauce and break down into a thick, tender texture during simmering.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and body as they soften into the sauce.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken and darken the sauce as it simmers.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavor and helps preserve the sauce.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp pungency that mellows during long simmering.

The step that matters

Draining the salted tomatoes. Salt draws water out of the sliced tomatoes overnight. Draining them well before adding vinegar keeps the sauce from becoming watery and lets it thicken properly as it simmers.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, onion, pepper, ginger, mustard, sugar, horseradish):

  1. Broccolifits better
  2. Radishfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, onion, pepper, ginger, mustard, sugar, horseradish. 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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