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Tomato Catsup

A homemade tomato sauce thickened with spices and vinegar, bottled while hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Tomato Catsup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Slice and boil ripe tomatoes until soft.

  2. Press out the juice and place it in a large pot over a brisk fire.

Make the ketchup

  1. Add salt, mace, Cayenne pepper, oil of cloves, and cider vinegar.

  2. Boil the mixture until thick, stirring occasionally.

  3. Bottle the catsup and seal it 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. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  3. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  5. Tomato + clovetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the main body, pulp and flavor of the ketchup.
Cider vinegar
Adds acidity that gives the ketchup its tang and helps preserve it.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the sauce and draws out moisture from the tomatoes.
Ground mace
Adds warm, aromatic spice flavor to the sauce.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture until thick, stirring occasionally. Reduction evaporates water and concentrates the tomato solids, so the sauce thickens. Stirring prevents the sugars and solids from scorching on the bottom of the pot.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Thymefits better
  4. Macethe original

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