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Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce

A pasta dish of broken spaghetti simmered in a tomato sauce with butter, onion, garlic, and parsley or celery.

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. Bring 1 quart of water to a boil in a pot.

  2. Add the broken spaghetti and salt.

  3. Stir to keep the pieces separated.

  4. Cover and reduce heat to just below boiling for 20 minutes.

  5. After 20 minutes, boil steadily for about 35 minutes until the spaghetti is easily mashed.

  6. During the last half-hour, leave the cover partly off to allow some water to evaporate.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in another saucepan.

  2. Sauté the onion, clove, and parsley or celery until delicate.

  3. Stir in the flour.

  4. Cook until it turns pale brown.

  5. Add the cooked and strained tomatoes.

  6. Cook for a few minutes.

  7. Remove the onion, clove, and parsley.

Combine and serve

  1. Add the spaghetti to the sauce.

  2. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

  3. 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 bulk of the dish and softens into a mashable, starchy base as it simmers.
Butter
Carries the onion and flavour into the pan and forms the fat base for the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the butter and tomatoes into a smooth sauce as it cooks.
Tomatoes
Provide the main body, acidity and flavour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the flour until pale brown. Flour must cook in the hot butter to lose its raw starchy taste and thicken properly. Cooking it only briefly leaves a pasty flavour, while over-browning makes the sauce taste bitter and dark.

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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