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Green Pepper Catsup

A fermented sauce made from green hot peppers, mace, allspice, cloves, onions, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Green Pepper Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Fill a porcelain-lined kettle with 10 pounds of green hot peppers.

  2. Crack 1 tablespoon each of mace, allspice, and cloves and mix with the peppers.

  3. Slice 4 large onions and add to the kettle.

Cook

  1. Fill the kettle with vinegar and boil until the peppers are soft.

  2. Remove from heat, cover, and let cool.

Strain

  1. Once cool, use a teacup to dip the mixture and pour it into a sieve.

  2. Rub the mixture through the sieve with a spoon until only skins and seeds remain.

  3. Discard the skins and seeds and repeat until all peppers are processed.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the catsup and cork tightly; no sealing is necessary.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Mace + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Green hot peppers
Provide the main body, pungent heat and bulk of the ketchup once softened and strained.
Onions
Add savory depth and body to the mixture as they soften during boiling.
Vinegar
Acts as the cooking liquid and provides acidity that gives the ketchup its tang.
Mace, allspice and cloves
Supply warm, aromatic spice flavour that infuses the mixture during cooking.

The step that matters

Boil until the peppers are soft. The peppers must be fully softened so they break down and pass through the sieve smoothly. Under-cooked peppers stay fibrous and leave too much pulp, while the vinegar's acidity helps extract flavour during the boil.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, mace, allspice, clove, 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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