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Tomato Sauce

A sauce made from tomatoes, herbs, and spices, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and allspice 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

Make the sauce

  1. In a stew pan, combine the tomatoes, cloves, thyme, parsley, bay leaf, peppercorns, allspice, carrot, and onion.

  2. Boil for about 20 minutes, then strain through a sieve.

Thicken and serve

  1. In another pan, melt the butter until bubbling, then sprinkle in the flour and stir until well cooked.

  2. Mix the flour mixture with the tomato pulp 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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Thyme + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,077 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  5. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Form the base of the sauce and provide its main body and acidity.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness to the finished sauce.
Flour
Cooked in the butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the butter. The flour must be stirred until well cooked, because undercooked flour tastes raw and does not thicken smoothly. Stirring also keeps it from browning or lumping.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, clove, thyme, parsley, allspice, carrot, butter):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, clove, thyme, parsley, allspice, carrot, butter. 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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