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Sauce

Wild Grape Catsup

A sweet and spicy sauce made from ripe wild grapes, vinegar, sugar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Wild Grape Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the ketchup

  1. Cook the grapes in enough mild vinegar to cover until soft.

  2. Add sugar, cinnamon, cloves, allspice, and cayenne.

  3. Cook until thick.

Store

  1. Store in a sealed container.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Cinnamon + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Grape + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,164 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Wild grapes
Provide the main fruit body and pulp that cooks down into the thick ketchup.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the ketchup as it cooks down.
Vinegar
Softens the grapes and adds acidity that gives the ketchup its tang.
Cinnamon
Adds warm aroma and flavour to the spiced ketchup.

The step that matters

Cook until thick. Sugar and fruit pectin thicken as water evaporates during cooking. Stopping too early leaves the ketchup runny, and cooking too long can scorch the sugars and make it bitter.

Swap the grape

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, clove, allspice):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against vinegar, sugar, cinnamon, clove, allspice. 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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