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Tomato Sauce

A simple sauce made from tomatoes, celery, onion, butter, flour, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and celery are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,377 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Cook the tomatoes, celery, and onion until soft.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Melt the butter in a pan.

  4. Add the flour and cook for 5 minutes.

Thicken the sauce

  1. Add the strained liquid to the pan.

  2. Cook until the sauce thickens.

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. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  2. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  3. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Butter + oniontop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main liquid and the tomato flavor that forms the body of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and carries flavor into the flour mixture.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells and gelatinizes in the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Add the flour and cook for 5 minutes. Cooking flour in melted butter drives off its raw, pasty taste and coats the starch granules with fat. This helps the flour thicken smoothly without lumps when the liquid is added.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, celery, flour, onion. 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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