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Sauce

Chetney Sauce

A spicy raisin and crab sauce with ginger, sugar, cayenne, garlic, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Chetney Sauce

Oven, in the book's wordsA very slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Stone the raisins and chop them finely.

  2. Chop the crabs or acid fruit into small pieces.

Make the sauce

  1. In a mortar, grind the sugar, ginger, salt, and cayenne pepper separately until fine.

  2. Pound the fruits well and mix in the spices one by one.

  3. Beat the mixture until perfectly blended.

  4. Gradually add vinegar until the sauce reaches the consistency of thick cream.

Bottle

  1. Transfer the sauce into bottles, adding the garlic cloves, and cork tightly.

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. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 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. Ginger + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Ginger + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 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

Crabs or acid fruit
Provides the acidic fruit base that gives the sauce its tang and body.
Stoned raisins
Adds sweetness and a soft, thick texture as they break down into the sauce.
Coarse brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sharpness of the acid and spices.
Cayenne pepper
Supplies heat that gives the sauce its pungent, spicy character.
Powdered ginger
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavour to the sauce.
Vinegar
Thins the mixture to a thick cream consistency and adds sharpness.

The step that matters

Gradually add vinegar until the sauce reaches the consistency of thick cream.. Vinegar thins the mixture quickly, so adding it all at once can make the sauce too runny. Adding it slowly lets you stop at the right thickness.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (crab, sugar, ginger, pepper, garlic, clove, vinegar):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against crab, sugar, ginger, pepper, garlic, 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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