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Breakfast

Breakfast Relish

A spicy, tangy relish made with saltfish, tomatoes, onions, ginger, and tamarind, served as a breakfast accompaniment.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

Breakfast Relish

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the saltfish and tomatoes in hot water.

  2. Remove the skins from the tomatoes and squeeze out the pulp and seeds, discarding them.

  3. Wash the saltfish to remove grit and skin, then mince all ingredients.

  4. Soak the tamarind in vinegar and remove the fibers.

Cook

  1. Heat ghee in a vessel and fry the saltfish and saffron until brown.

  2. Add the remaining ingredients and boil until thick.

Store

  1. Store when cool.

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 + tamarindtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together325 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  3. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  4. Tomato + saffrontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together369 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

  5. Garlic + gingertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,402 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Saltfish
Provides the savoury base, and browning in ghee deepens its flavour.
Tomatoes
Add moisture and body, thickening into a relish as they cook down.
Tamarind
Adds sourness that balances the salty fish and rich fried flavours.
Ghee
Adds fat for frying, carrying flavour and helping the saltfish brown.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the relish and helps keep it tart.

The step that matters

Frying the saltfish and saffron in ghee. Browning the saltfish builds savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction, but ground saffron can scorch quickly over high heat and turn bitter. Keep the heat moderate and stir often so the fish browns evenly.

Swap the saffron

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, garlic, ginger, tamarind, ghee, tomato, vinegar):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Corianderfits better
  4. Saffronthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, garlic, ginger, tamarind, ghee, tomato, vinegar. 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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