Skip to main content
Sauce

Creole Sauce

A tomato-based sauce with onions, peppers, ham or bacon, and seasonings, simmered for 30 minutes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Creole Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tomato sauce

  1. Cook the tomatoes and pass them through a sieve to make tomato sauce.

  2. Cook the pulp until it reaches the consistency of ketchup.

Build the sauce

  1. Chop the onion and fry it in butter until yellow.

  2. Add the green and red peppers, tomato sauce, ham, and seasonings.

  3. Simmer for 30 minutes and serve 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. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + ketchuptop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together260 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,398 recipes

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

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 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

Tomato sauce
Forms the liquid base and provides the sauce's main body and acidity.
Butter
Fat that softens and browns the onion, adding richness to the base.
Ham or bacon
Adds savory, smoky flavor that seasons the sauce as it simmers.
Green pepper
Adds fresh, slightly bitter vegetable flavor and soft texture after simmering.
Red pepper
Adds sweetness and color, softening as the sauce simmers.

The step that matters

Simmer for 30 minutes. Simmering lets the tomato sauce thicken and the flavors blend, while the peppers soften. Simmering too hard can scorch the sauce on the bottom of the pan.

Swap the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, sugar, butter, ham, tomato, sauce, ketchup):

  1. Capersfits better
  2. Celeryfits better
  3. Garlicfits better
  4. Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, sugar, butter, ham, tomato, sauce, ketchup. 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes