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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
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Why it works: Tomato and shallot work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 583 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 place them on dishes.

  2. Sprinkle the salt over the tomatoes and let them sit overnight.

  3. The next day, 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. Add the strained tomatoes and boil the mixture for an additional 30 minutes.

Bottle and seal

  1. Prepare clean bottles by warming them by the fire.

  2. Fill the bottles with the hot catsup, cork them, and seal with rosin 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. Tomato + shallottop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together583 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
Provide the main body, flavour and liquid that the ketchup is built from.
Coarse sea salt
Draws juice out of the tomatoes and seasons the mixture.
Capsicums (in the method)
Add sweet, mild pepper flavour to the simmered juice.
Shallots
Add savoury, mild onion-like aroma to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Boil the juice before adding the tomatoes. Boiling the strained juice first reduces its water and concentrates flavour before the tomatoes join. Keeping the boil steady helps the sauce thicken rather than stay thin and watery.

“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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