Skip to main content
Main

Bottled Tomatas, or Tomata Catsup

A preserved tomato sauce made by boiling tomatoes, capsicums, and shallots with salt, then bottling the hot mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Capsicum and shallot are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,984 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Bottled Tomatas, or Tomata Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Cut the tomatoes into quarters and sprinkle with salt.

  2. Let the tomatoes sit overnight.

  3. Drain the juice through a fine sieve into a saucepan.

Cook the ketchup

  1. Boil the juice for 30 minutes with the capsicums and shallots.

  2. Strain the tomatoes to remove skins and seeds.

  3. Add the strained tomatoes to the boiling mixture.

  4. Boil everything together for another 30 minutes.

Bottle and seal

  1. Prepare clean, warm wide-necked bottles.

  2. Fill the bottles with the hot catsup.

  3. Cork the bottles.

  4. Dip the necks in melted resin or cement to seal.

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. Capsicum + shallottop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,984 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes (in the method)
Provide the main body, flavour and liquid of the ketchup once cooked down.
Coarse sea salt
Draws juice out of the tomatoes overnight, and seasons the mixture.
Capsicums
Add sweet, vegetal flavour and body to the cooked sauce.
Shallots
Add mild aromatic onion flavour that builds depth during boiling.

The step that matters

Boil the juice before adding the tomatoes. Boiling the drained juice with the capsicums and shallots first concentrates its flavour and thickens it, so the added tomato pulp then cooks into a sauce rather than thinning it out.

“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 tomato ketchup recipes

Green 26 See all 523 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes