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Tomato Sauce

A simple sauce made from canned tomatoes, butter, onions, flour, vinegar, spices, and mustard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Fry the onions in the butter until soft.

  2. Stir in the flour and cook for 2 minutes.

  3. Add the tomatoes and all other ingredients, stirring well.

  4. Let the mixture boil for 15 minutes.

  5. Strain through a gravy strainer into a sauce tureen.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

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

  4. Tomato + clovetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Canned tomatoes
Provide the main body and acidic tomato flavour of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and carries flavour when frying the onions.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the liquids.
Cider vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that brightens the tomato flavour.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour before adding the tomatoes. Cooking the flour briefly in the butter removes its raw taste and helps it thicken smoothly rather than leaving lumps or a pasty flavour.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, onion, flour, cider, vinegar, allspice, clove):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, onion, flour, cider, vinegar, allspice, clove. 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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