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Sauce

Currant Catsup

A sweet and spicy currant condiment made with sugar, spices, and vinegar.

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 ↓

Currant Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the currants and sugar together until thick.

  2. Add the salt, cinnamon, cloves, pepper, and vinegar.

  3. Heat the mixture once more and then bottle it for immediate use.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  4. Cinnamon + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  5. Currant + cidertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together500 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe currants
Provide the main fruit body and tart flavour, and their pectin helps the mixture thicken.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body, and helps the mixture thicken as it stews.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the ketchup.

The step that matters

Stewing the currants and sugar until thick. Cooking the fruit down long enough lets its pectin and sugar set the mixture to a thick consistency. Stopping too early leaves it runny, and the sauce then thickens only slightly as it cools.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Applefits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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