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Sauce

Pepper Sauce

A sauce made from boiled red peppers, garlic, onions, horseradish, vinegar, and spices, then bottled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 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 ↓

Pepper Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the base

  1. Boil the peppers, garlic, onions, salt, and horseradish together until well cooked.

  2. Strain the mixture through a wire sieve.

Season and bottle

  1. For every pint of the mixture, add 1 pint of wine vinegar.

  2. Add the ground black pepper, allspice, and cloves to the mixture.

  3. Boil again for 4 to 5 minutes.

  4. Bottle and seal the sauce.

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

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Horseradish + allspicetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together654 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

What each ingredient does

Red peppers
Form the bulk of the sauce and break down into a soft pulp when boiled.
Onions
Add sweetness and body as they soften and mellow during long boiling.
Garlic
Contributes a pungent aroma that mellows and becomes savory with cooking.
Wine vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the sauce and helps preserve it.
Horseradish
Adds a sharp, pungent heat that gives the sauce its bite.
Black pepper
Adds a sharp, warming spice that rounds out the heat.

The step that matters

Cook the vegetables until very soft before straining. Peppers, onions and garlic must break down fully so the sieve can press them into a smooth pulp. Undercooked pieces stay fibrous and block the sieve, leaving a coarse, uneven sauce.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, garlic, horseradish, wine, vinegar, allspice, clove):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Broccolifits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, garlic, horseradish, wine, vinegar, allspice, clove. 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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