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Tomato Sauce

A preserved tomato sauce made by boiling tomatoes, apples, vinegar, salt, sugar, cloves, allspice, pepper, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice 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 Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Put the tomatoes in a saucepan and boil them until soft.

  2. Rub the tomatoes through a sieve.

  3. Boil the pulp for an hour.

Make the sauce

  1. Add vinegar, salt, sugar, cloves, allspice, cracked pepper, and cayenne.

  2. Allow to boil for four more hours.

  3. Slice and core the apples.

  4. Boil the apples with the mixture.

Bottle and seal

  1. Allow the sauce to cool.

  2. Bottle the sauce.

  3. Cork the bottles.

  4. Seal with sealing wax.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Clove + appletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,774 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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 sauce, providing body and flavour once boiled down.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens flavour and helps preserve the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity of the vinegar and tomatoes.
Apples
Add natural pectin and body, thickening the sauce as they cook down.
Cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Long simmering of the sauce. Boiling for four hours reduces water and thickens the sauce. Stirring and keeping the heat gentle helps prevent scorching on the bottom of the pan, which would give a burnt taste.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, clove, allspice, pepper, apple. 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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