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Sauce

Tomato Catsup

A preserved tomato sauce made by boiling tomatoes, seasoning, and adding vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomato juice

  1. Cut ripe tomatoes.

  2. Boil the tomatoes and strain the juice.

  3. Return the strained juice to the stove and boil until half done.

Season and finish

  1. Add salt, pepper, allspice, mustard, mace, cloves, and ginger to the juice.

  2. Boil the mixture for one hour.

  3. Stir in the vinegar and bring to a boil.

  4. Bottle the catsup.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Allspice + mustardtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Pepper + clovetop 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

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the main body, flavour and liquid that the ketchup is built from.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavour and helps preserve the finished ketchup.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the ketchup and draws out flavour from the tomato juice.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for one hour. Long simmering evaporates water and concentrates the tomato juice, so the ketchup thickens and its flavours deepen. Stopping early leaves it thin and watery.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, allspice, mustard, clove, ginger, vinegar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, allspice, mustard, clove, ginger, 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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