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Chetney Sauce

A sauce made from raisins, crabs or other acid fruit, sugar, ginger, salt, cayenne pepper, 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.

Make the sauce

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

  2. Beat the mixture until perfectly blended.

  3. Gradually add vinegar until it reaches a thick cream consistency.

Bottle and seal

  1. Transfer the sauce into bottles.

  2. Add the garlic cloves.

  3. 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 the fruit base and acidity that gives the sauce its tangy character.
Raisins
Add sweetness and body, helping the sauce thicken as they break down.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and depth that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and fruit.
Vinegar
Adds acidity and thins the mixture to the desired thick cream consistency.
Cayenne pepper
Adds heat and pungency to the sauce.

The step that matters

Gradually add vinegar until it reaches a thick cream consistency. Vinegar thins the mixture, so adding it in small amounts lets you stop at the right thickness. Too much at once makes the sauce runny and hard to correct.

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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