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Tomato Sauce— Serve with Steak or Roast Beef

A tomato sauce with coconut cream, green pepper, ginger, celery, onion juice, and spices, served with steak or roast beef.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce— Serve with Steak or Roast Beef

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Strain the grated coconut through cheesecloth and set aside to skim the cream.

  2. Mix the chopped tomatoes with green pepper, ginger, celery, and onion juice.

  3. Add salt and red pepper to the tomato mixture and mix carefully.

Assemble and serve

  1. Line a dish with lettuce leaves and pour the tomato mixture into it.

  2. Skim the coconut cream from the water and pour it over the tomato mixture.

  3. Squeeze a few drops of lemon juice on top 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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,467 recipes

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

  3. Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,033 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

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

  5. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Grated coconut
Provides the rich coconut cream that is skimmed off and poured over the sauce, adding fat and body.
Tomatoes
Form the base of the sauce, supplying moisture, acidity and most of its volume.
Lemon juice
Adds brightness and acidity that sharpens the flavour of the tomatoes and coconut.

Swap the coconut

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, ginger, celery, onion, lettuce, lemon):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Coconutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, ginger, celery, onion, lettuce, lemon. 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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