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Tomato Sauce for Cutlets

A tomato sauce made with tomatoes, garlic, ginger, onion, peppercorns, and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce for Cutlets

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cut the tomatoes in halves.

  2. Add the pounded garlic, ginger, and minced onion.

  3. Boil all together in the warm water with the peppercorns and salt to taste.

  4. When the tomatoes are soft, strain the sauce through a coarse strainer or sieve, rubbing the pulp well.

Serve

  1. Serve warm.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Garlic + gingertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together6,402 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  5. Ginger + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,595 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

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the main body and flavor of the sauce once cooked and softened.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and savory depth to the sauce.
Green ginger
Adds sharp, aromatic warmth that complements the tomatoes.
Onion
Adds sweetness and savory base flavor as it cooks down.

The step that matters

Straining the cooked tomatoes. Cooked tomatoes must be soft before straining, otherwise little pulp passes through. Rubbing the pulp through the sieve thickens the sauce and removes seeds and skins.

Swap the ginger

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, garlic, onion):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Oreganofits better
  3. Corianderfits better
  4. Gingerthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, garlic, 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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