Name: Tomato Sauce
Ingredients: fresh tomatoes; slice of raw ham; 2 shallots; few spoonfuls of good stock; good brown sauce; cayenne pepper; coarse sea salt; sugar; lemon juice

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

Ingredients

Directions

Remove the stalks from the fresh tomatoes and press them tightly in a saucepan.
Cover and heat on the stove, then strain off the liquid that is released.
Add the slice of raw ham, shallots, and stock to the tomatoes and let it stew for 1 hour.
Rub the mixture through a fine sieve.
In another saucepan, heat a little good brown sauce and add the strained tomatoes.
Boil together and season with cayenne, salt, sugar, and lemon juice.

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.

Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Shallot + lemontop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,523 recipes

Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).
Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together17,923 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + lemontop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together4,592 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together5,898 recipes

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

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

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, shallot, sauce, pepper, sugar, lemon):

Mustardfits better
Capsicumfits better
Arrowrootfits better
Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, shallot, sauce, pepper, sugar, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.