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Sauce

Indian Sharp Sauce

A vinegar-based sauce made with apricots, raisins, onions, garlic, chillies, ginger, salt, sugar, and lime or lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Indian Sharp Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pound together the apricots, raisins, salt, sugar, ginger, chillies, onion, and garlic until well crushed.

  2. Pour in the vinegar and lime or lemon juice.

Steep

  1. Seal the jar tightly and leave it in the sun for a month, or in a warm corner of the kitchen.

  2. Shake and stir the mixture daily.

Strain and bottle

  1. After a month, strain off the liquid and bottle it, discarding the thick residue.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Ginger + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,621 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Ginger + garlictop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Garlic + limetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,411 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  5. Apricot + gingertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together341 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Apricots or peaches
Provide fruity sweetness and body to the sauce base.
Raisins
Add concentrated sweetness and a soft, sticky texture as they soften.
Vinegar
Provides the sharp acidity and acts as the main preserving liquid.
Lime or lemon juice
Adds bright citrus acidity that sharpens the flavour.
Garlic
Contributes pungent aroma that mellows during long steeping.

The step that matters

Seal the jar tightly and steep for a month. Acid from the vinegar and citrus draws flavour out of the solids over time. A loose seal or too little acid can let the mixture spoil before it matures.

Swap the raisin

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apricot, sugar, ginger, onion, garlic, vinegar, lime):

  1. Mangofits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apricot, sugar, ginger, onion, garlic, vinegar, lime. 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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