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Tomato Sauce

A fermented tomato sauce made with bruised tomatoes, salt, spices, and cochineal, boiled and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 3,331 recipes mention both. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Extract the juice

  1. Mix bruised tomatoes and coarse sea salt, then let sit for three days to extract juice.

  2. Squeeze out the juice. For each half-gallon of juice, add shallots and black pepper.

Spice and simmer

  1. Boil the mixture for 30 minutes, then strain.

  2. Add mace, allspice, ginger, nutmeg, coriander seed, and cochineal. Simmer gently for another 30 minutes.

  3. Strain again and let cool before bottling.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Allspice + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together3,331 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,620 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Ginger + coriandertop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Tomato + coriandertop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  5. Mace + nutmegtop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together6,557 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

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

What each ingredient does

Bruised tomatoes
Provide the base juice that becomes the sauce.
Coarse sea salt
Draws juice out of the tomatoes during the three-day rest.
Shallots
Add aromatic onion flavor to the juice.
Cochineal
Adds red colour to the finished sauce.

Flavor stand-ins for the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, shallot, pepper, allspice, ginger, nutmeg, coriander):

  1. Cinnamonbetter flavor fit
  2. Cuminbetter flavor fit
  3. Clovebetter flavor fit
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, shallot, pepper, allspice, ginger, nutmeg, coriander. 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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