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Sauce

Tomato Mustard

A tomato-based sauce flavored with mustard, spices, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Tomato Mustard

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Peel the tomatoes and boil them with the red peppers for 1 hour.

  2. Add the other spices, except for the mustard and vinegar.

  3. Strain the sauce through a colander and let it cool.

  4. After cooling, add the mustard and vinegar.

  5. Boil the mixture for another hour.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Ginger + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe tomatoes
Form the bulk of the sauce and provide its main liquid and body.
Mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavor that gives the sauce its characteristic bite.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps preserve the sauce.
Onions
Add savory sweetness and aromatic body as they cook down into the sauce.

The step that matters

Adding the mustard and vinegar after cooling. The record directs adding these after the sauce has been strained and cooled, before the final boil. Mustard's pungent compounds are volatile and can turn bitter or lose sharpness with prolonged heat, so the sauce should be reheated only as directed to keep the flavor bright.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, ginger, allspice, clove, garlic, onion):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Turmericfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, ginger, allspice, clove, garlic, onion. 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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