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Tomato Sauce

A sauce made from canned tomatoes, cloves, onion, butter, flour, pepper, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Cook the tomatoes, cloves, and grated onion for 10 minutes.

  2. In a pan, heat the butter and add the flour; stir until smooth and brown.

  3. Stir the butter and flour mixture into the tomatoes and cook for 2 more minutes.

  4. Rub the sauce through a sieve and season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

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 + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

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

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

  4. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Canned tomatoes
Form the sauce base and provide the main body and acidity.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and tomatoes.

The step that matters

Stirring the butter and flour mixture into the tomatoes. Flour clumps if added without first cooking it in fat, so the roux must be stirred until smooth before it meets the hot tomatoes. Cooking the mixture for a few minutes afterward lets the flour swell fully and thicken the sauce without a raw starchy taste.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Chivefits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, clove, onion, pepper. 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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