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Italian Sauce

A sauce made with butter, shallots, mushrooms, tomato sauce, parsley, lemon juice, and soy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Italian Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. In a skillet, melt the butter over medium heat.

  2. Add the chopped shallots or onions and fry until brown.

  3. Add the chopped mushrooms and cook until softened.

  4. Add the strained tomato sauce, chopped parsley, and lemon juice.

  5. Thicken the sauce slightly.

  6. Darken it with a few drops of soy sauce.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce around the timbales before serving.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Shallot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,737 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Shallot + mushroomtop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,982 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,523 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  5. Mushroom + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Carries the cooking of the aromatics and adds richness to the sauce.
Shallots or onions
Browning them adds savoury depth and a sweet base flavour to the sauce.
Mushrooms
Soften as they cook, releasing moisture and adding earthy body to the sauce.
Strained tomato sauce
Forms the main body of the sauce and supplies its acidity and tomato flavour.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the tomato and balances the richness of the butter.

The step that matters

Frying the shallots or onions until brown. Browning develops deep, savoury flavour through the Maillard reaction. Pale or under-browned onions leave the sauce tasting flat, while over-browning can turn them bitter.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (shallot, butter, mushroom, sauce, parsley, lemon):

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Leekfits better
  3. Spinachfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against shallot, butter, mushroom, sauce, parsley, lemon. 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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