Skip to main content
Main

Chili Sauce

A tomato-based sauce with onions, peppers, vinegar, sugar, salt, cloves, cinnamon, and allspice, boiled for an hour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and cinnamon 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 ↓

Chili Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cook

  1. Chop the tomatoes, onions, and peppers finely.

  2. Combine all ingredients in a large pot and boil for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.

Bottle

  1. Pour the hot sauce into sterilized bottles and seal immediately.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 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. 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

Tomatoes
Form the bulk of the sauce and supply moisture and body as they cook down.
Onions
Soften during cooking to add body and a savoury base.
Peppers
Add pepper flavour and a mild heat that carries through the long boil.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that rounds out the acidity of the vinegar and tomatoes.
Ground cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice notes to the sauce.

The step that matters

Pour the hot sauce into sterilized bottles and seal immediately. Filling while the sauce is hot and sealing at once helps keep contaminants out of the bottles and lets a seal form as the sauce cools. Sterilized containers reduce the microbes that could spoil the sauce later, and the acidity from the vinegar adds further protection.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

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

More chili sauce recipes

Tomato 14Green Tomato 4Raw 3Sweet 3 See all 392 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesCream Tomato SoupCream Tomato Soup28 recipes