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Sauce

Chetney Sauce

A thick, spiced sauce made with raisins, crab, sugar, ginger, salt, 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

  1. Stone the raisins and chop them finely with the crabs or acid fruit.

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

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

Make the sauce

  1. Beat the mixture until perfectly blended, then gradually add vinegar until it reaches a thick cream consistency.

  2. 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

Raisins
Add sweetness and body, and help thicken the sauce as they break down.
Crabs or other hard acid fruit
Provide acidity and bulk that give the chutney its fruity tang.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and depth, and helps balance the sharpness of the vinegar and fruit.
Vinegar
Adds acidity and thins the mixture to a thick cream consistency while helping preserve it.

The step that matters

Beat until perfectly blended before adding vinegar. Fine grinding and thorough beating spread the spices evenly through the pulp. Adding vinegar gradually lets you stop at a thick cream consistency, since too much liquid at once makes the sauce thin and uneven.

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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