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Sauce

Currant Catsup

A sweet and tangy sauce made from currants, sugar, vinegar, pepper, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and vinegar work together. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 693 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Currant Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Combine currants, sugar, vinegar, mixed pepper, and salt in a pot.

  2. Boil the mixture for 30 minutes.

  3. Bottle the catsup while hot.

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. Currant + vinegartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together693 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Sugar + vinegartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,806 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes
  5. Currant + peppertop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,345 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Currants
Provide the main fruit body, pectin and tartness that form the ketchup's base.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and body, and helps preserve the thick, spreadable texture.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and helps keep the ketchup stable.
Mixed red and black pepper
Adds pungent heat and aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture for 30 minutes. Boiling drives off water and lets the fruit's pectin and sugar thicken the sauce. Too short a boil leaves it thin and more prone to spoiling in the bottle.

Swap the currant

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, pepper. 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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