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Tomato Sauce

A tomato sauce made by stewing tomatoes with cloves, parsley, pepper, and salt, then pureeing and simmering with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the tomatoes with the cloves, parsley, pepper, and salt for 30 minutes.

  2. Press the mixture through a sieve.

  3. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat until bubbling. Add the flour and cook well, stirring constantly.

  4. Stir in the tomato pulp until smooth and consistent.

  5. Optionally, add stock for improved flavor.

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. Tomato + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,398 recipes

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

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, acidity and flavor of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavor through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter into a roux.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. Flour must be cooked with the melted butter while stirring constantly; this cooks off raw starch taste and lets the flour thicken the sauce evenly without lumps.

Swap the tomato

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

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

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