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Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce

A simple pasta dish with tomato sauce, onions, garlic, herbs, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the spaghetti

  1. Add broken spaghetti and salt to a quart of fast-boiling water. Boil for several minutes, stirring to keep pieces separated.

  2. Cover and reduce heat to just below boiling for 20 minutes, then boil steadily for 35 minutes until the spaghetti is soft.

Make the sauce

  1. In another saucepan, add onion, garlic clove, parsley or celery, and butter. Fry delicately.

  2. Stir in flour until it turns pale brown, then add cooked and strained tomatoes. Cook for a few minutes.

  3. Remove onion, garlic, and parsley. Add cooked spaghetti to the sauce, season with salt and pepper, 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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Spaghetti
Forms the body of the dish, softening as it boils until tender.
Butter
Fats the pan and carries the flavour of the aromatics into the sauce.
Flour
Browned in the butter, it thickens the sauce and adds a toasted, nutty flavour.
Tomatoes
Form the base of the sauce, supplying moisture, acidity and body.

The step that matters

Stir in flour until pale brown. Cooking the flour in butter until it turns pale brown removes its raw taste and lets it thicken the tomatoes smoothly. Stopping too early leaves a pasty, floury flavour; going too far darkens and bitters the roux.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, clove, parsley, butter, flour, pepper):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Chivefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, clove, parsley, butter, flour, pepper. 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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