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Sauce

Tomato Catsup

A preserved tomato sauce made with tomatoes, salt, sugar, spices, and cloves, then bottled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tomato base

  1. Cook the cut tomatoes until soft.

  2. Rub the cooked tomatoes through a sieve.

  3. Return the sieved tomatoes to the pot and cook again until the water is mostly evaporated, about 30 minutes.

Season and bottle

  1. Add salt, sugar, red pepper, black pepper, cinnamon, and cloves.

  2. Bottle the catsup, seal it, and lay the bottles on their flat sides.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  4. Pepper + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  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

Tomatoes
Provide the main body and flavour of the ketchup once cooked and sieved.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the tomatoes.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the sauce and enhances the tomato flavour.

The step that matters

Cooking down the sieved tomatoes. Cooking until most of the water evaporates concentrates the tomato flavour and thickens the sauce. Stopping too early leaves it thin and watery, which affects both texture and how long it keeps.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

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