Skip to main content
Sauce

Cold Catsup

A cold tomato sauce made with tomatoes, horseradish, mustard, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Horseradish and mustard 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 ↓

Cold Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Sprinkle sliced tomatoes with coarse sea salt and let stand for 2 hours.

  2. Rub the tomatoes through a coarse sieve or colander.

Make the catsup

  1. Add grated horseradish, salt, white mustard seed, black pepper, chopped celery, chopped onions, sugar, ground cloves, ground cinnamon, and cider vinegar to the tomato mixture, then mix everything cold.

  2. Can for long-term storage.

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. Horseradish + mustardtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mustard + celerytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,169 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the bulk of the catsup and supply its base body and tang.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the vinegar and tomatoes and adds sweetness.
Cider vinegar
Provides acidity that gives the catsup its sharp flavor and helps preserve it.
White mustard seed
Adds pungent flavor that mellows as the catsup sits.
Horseradish
Contributes sharp, pungent heat that fades with time.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Turnipfits better
  2. Lettucefits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

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

You might also like

Cider SauceCider Sauce15 recipesMixed MustardMixed Mustard9 recipesHorseradish Cream SauceHorseradish Cream Sauce6 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipes