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Sauce

Ripe Tomato Catsup

A thick tomato sauce made by stewing tomatoes with salt, mustard, spices, sugar, vinegar, and currant jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Ripe Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Make the ketchup

  1. Stew and strain the sliced tomatoes.

  2. Add salt, mustard, black pepper, cayenne pepper, brown sugar, and vinegar.

  3. Boil until thickened to the consistency of cream, watching carefully to prevent burning.

Finish and bottle

  1. Remove from heat and add cinnamon, cloves, and currant jelly, mixing thoroughly.

  2. Can or bottle while hot, seal with corks, and dip in sealing wax.

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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Mustard + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Mustard + vinegartop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,067 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the main body and bulk of the ketchup.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the vinegar's sharpness.
Vinegar
Provides acidity that gives the ketchup its tang and helps preserve it.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness, body and a fruity note to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Boiling until thickened. Sugar and tomato solids scorch easily on direct heat, and burnt flavour carries through the whole batch. Stirring and watching closely while the mixture reduces to a creamy consistency prevents this.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Cherryfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Currantthe original

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