Skip to main content
Sauce

Soyer’s Tomato Sauce

A tomato sauce made with tomatoes, onion, thyme, bay leaf, ham, shallots, stock, and seasoned with pepper, salt, sugar, and lemon juice.

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

Why it works: Thyme and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 3,973 recipes mention both. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Soyer’s Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the tomatoes into pieces and place them in a stewpan.

  2. Add the sliced onion, thyme, bay leaf, raw ham, shallots, and soup stock.

Cook and strain

  1. Cook over moderate heat for at least 1 hour without adding water.

  2. Pass the mixture through a sieve to remove solids.

Finish and serve

  1. Reheat the sauce and season with pepper, salt, sugar, and lemon juice 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Thyme + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together3,973 recipes

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

  2. Thyme + shallottop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,476 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together11,585 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,370 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

Tomatoes
Provide the main body, acidity and flavour of the sauce as they cook down.
Raw ham
Adds savoury, meaty depth to the sauce as it simmers.
Shallots
Contribute mild onion sweetness and aroma to the base.
Soup stock
Adds liquid and savoury body, helping the tomatoes break down.

The step that matters

Cooking without added water. Tomatoes release their own juice, so cooking over moderate heat for the full hour lets it reduce and concentrate. Cooking too hard can scorch the bottom and give a burnt taste, so the heat needs to stay gentle and the pan needs watching.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, thyme, ham, shallot, pepper, sugar, lemon):

  1. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  2. Okrabetter flavor fit
  3. Mustardbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, thyme, ham, shallot, pepper, sugar, lemon. 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.

You might also like

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes