Name: Mogul or Chetna Sauce
Ingredients: 12 shallots; 1 pint vinegar; 1 pint mushroom catsup; ⅓ cup soy sauce; 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper; ½ teaspoon mustard seed; ½ teaspoon allspice

Why it works: Shallot and mustard match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 859 recipes. Both carry eucalyptol, which smells eucalyptus, herbal. The science ↓

Mogul or Chetna Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

Steep the shallots in vinegar for 12 hours.
Strain the mixture.
Combine with mushroom catsup, soy sauce, cayenne pepper, mustard seed, and allspice.
Boil the mixture.

Bottle

Let it cool, then bottle 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.

Shallot + mustardtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together859 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together1,928 recipes

Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).
Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,982 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together6,395 recipes

Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).
Shallot + allspicetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together386 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Shallots: Steeped in vinegar to release their onion flavour into the sauce.
Vinegar: Provides acidity and extracts flavour from the shallots during steeping.
Mushroom catsup: Adds deep savoury umami flavour as the base of the sauce.
Soy sauce: Adds salty, savoury depth that rounds out the sauce.

Swap the allspice

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, vinegar, mushroom, sauce, pepper, mustard):

Capersfits better
Tarragonfits better
Thymefits better
Allspicethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, vinegar, mushroom, sauce, pepper, mustard. 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.