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Tomato Sauce

A sauce made from tomatoes, carrot, onion, mace, cloves, salt, pepper, flour, and butter, simmered and thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Chop the tomatoes, carrot, and onion.

Make the sauce

  1. Place them in a saucepan and stew until the carrot and onion are tender.

  2. Pass the mixture through a sieve back into the saucepan.

  3. Mix 1 teaspoon of flour and 2 teaspoons of butter together, then add to the sauce to thicken.

Serve

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

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

  5. Carrot + oniontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 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

Tomatoes
Provide the main body and acidity of the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with butter.
Butter
Adds richness and helps the flour thicken the sauce smoothly.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness as it softens during stewing.
Carrot
Adds subtle sweetness and body as it softens during stewing.

The step that matters

Adding the flour and butter mixture. If the flour and butter are added straight to the hot sauce without being blended together first, lumps can form. Mixing them into a smooth paste before adding helps the starch disperse evenly and thicken the sauce uniformly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Cuminfits better
  4. Macethe original

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