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Ripe Tomato Soy

A pickled tomato sauce made with tomatoes, onions, vinegar, spices, sugar, and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Ripe Tomato Soy

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine the tomatoes, onions, and salt in a large bowl.

  2. Let the mixture stand for 24 hours.

  3. Drain off all the liquid.

Make the sauce

  1. Add the vinegar, ground mustard, ginger, cloves, and allspice.

  2. Stew the mixture slowly for 2 to 3 hours.

  3. When nearly done, stir in the sugar and white mustard.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Mustard + allspicetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,928 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the bulk and the main body of the sauce as they break down.
Onions
Add savoury depth and body as they soften during the long stew.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that preserves the sauce and gives it a sharp tang.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity of the vinegar.
White mustard
Adds sharp, pungent flavour to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Stew the mixture slowly for 2 to 3 hours. Slow, gentle cooking lets the tomatoes and onions break down and thicken into a smooth sauce while the vinegar's sharpness mellows. Rapid boiling can scorch the sugar and leave the sauce uneven.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

  1. Horseradishbetter flavor fit
  2. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  3. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, vinegar, mustard, ginger, clove, allspice, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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