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Tomato Sauce

A sauce made with butter, flour, stock, stewed tomatoes, carrot, onion, bay leaf, parsley, garlic, salt, pepper, and cayenne.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Brown the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir to a smooth paste, continuing to brown.

  3. Add the seasonings and gradually pour in the brown stock, stirring constantly.

  4. Add the tomato pulp, stir briskly, and let simmer for fifteen minutes.

  5. Strain the sauce and serve.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

Butter
Browned in the pan to add fat and a nutty, toasted flavour to the base.
Flour
Stirred into the butter to form a paste that thickens the sauce as it cooks.
Brown stock
Added gradually to the paste to make the sauce liquid and savoury.
Stewed tomatoes
Provide the tomato body, acidity and colour of the sauce.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour paste and adding stock gradually. Flour must be cooked smooth in the hot fat and the liquid added slowly while stirring constantly; otherwise lumps form that cannot be fully smoothed out, and the sauce thickens unevenly.

Swap the tomato

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

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

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