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Sauce

Tomato Catsup

A preserved tomato sauce made by boiling tomatoes with spices, sugar, vinegar, and salt, then straining and bottling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 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 tomatoes

  1. Cut the tomatoes in half and pour hot water over them.

  2. Add peach leaves and onions, then boil for 1 hour until tomatoes break down.

  3. Strain the mixture and return the liquid to the boiler.

Season and cook

  1. Add allspice, ground pepper, mustard, cloves, nutmegs, brown sugar, vinegar, and salt.

  2. Mix well and boil for 2 hours, stirring to prevent burning.

  3. If not thick enough, cook longer.

Bottle

  1. Strain again and seal in small bottles.

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. Allspice + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 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

Tomatoes
Provide the main body, pulp and flavour of the ketchup.
Onions
Add savoury depth and sweetness as they cook down with the tomatoes.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavour and helps preserve the ketchup.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the acidity of the vinegar and tomatoes.
Mustard
Contributes sharp, pungent flavour that rounds out the spice blend.

The step that matters

Stirring during the long boil. Ketchup holds a lot of sugar and tomato solids, which scorch easily on the bottom of the pan during the two-hour boil. Frequent stirring prevents burnt flavour and keeps the thickening even.

Swap the peach

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Peachthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, onion, allspice, pepper, mustard, clove, nutmeg. 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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