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Sauce

Chetney Sauce

A spicy raisin and crab sauce made with 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 other 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 and bottle 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

Crabs or other acid fruit
Provides acidity and fruity body that balances the sweetness and heat of the sauce.
Coarse brown sugar
Adds sweetness and a molasses note that rounds out the sharp spices.
Cayenne pepper
Supplies the sharp heat that defines the sauce.
Vinegar
Adds sourness and sets the thick cream consistency of the sauce.
Stoned raisins
Add sweetness and body, thickening the chopped fruit mixture.

The step that matters

Grinding the spices fine and beating until perfectly blended. Spices left coarse or unevenly mixed produce gritty pockets of heat in the sauce. Fine, thorough blending spreads the pungency evenly, and adding vinegar gradually lets you stop at the right thick cream texture rather than overshooting into a thin liquid.

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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