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Tomato Catsup

A homemade tomato sauce made with tomatoes, sugar, vinegar, spices, mustard, and corn starch thickened into a condiment.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 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 ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Choose very ripe red tomatoes, cut off the stem end, and rub through a fine colander or wire sieve.

Cook the ketchup

  1. Combine the tomato pulp with the sugar, vinegar, whole spices, cinnamon, mustard, salt, prepared mustard, cloves, black pepper, and paprika.

  2. Boil the mixture down by half.

  3. Dissolve the corn starch in cold water and stir it into the boiling mixture.

  4. Continue stirring while boiling for 5 more minutes.

Bottle

  1. Bottle the catsup.

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 + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Tomato + corntop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Cinnamon + mustardtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 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

Tomato pulp
Forms the body and main flavor of the ketchup as it reduces.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the vinegar and tomatoes.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and helps preserve the sauce.
Corn starch
Thickens the sauce when stirred into the boiling mixture.

The step that matters

Stirring in the corn starch slurry. Corn starch must be fully dissolved in cold water first and stirred into boiling liquid, then kept stirring. Otherwise it clumps and the sauce can turn lumpy or scorch on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Horseradishfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

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