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Tomato Sauce

A simple tomato sauce made by simmering tomato juice with onion, bay leaves, salt, sugar, and thickened with flour and olive oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and olive are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,539 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Heat the tomato juice in a saucepan until it is scalding.

  2. Add the onion juice, bay leaves, salt, and sugar.

  3. Boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Strain the mixture.

  5. Add the baking soda.

Thicken and finish

  1. In a bowl, mix the whole-wheat flour with the olive oil until well blended.

  2. Stir the flour mixture into the tomato juice and boil until thickened to a creamy consistency.

  3. Thin with milk or cream to taste, if desired.

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. Tomato + olivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,539 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Wheat + olivetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,100 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-undecenal (sweet).

  3. Wheat + milktop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,418 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,z)-2,6-nonadienal (cucumber, melon).

  4. Tomato + wheattop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together468 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Tomato juice
Forms the liquid base of the sauce, carrying the other flavors.
Whole-wheat flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when boiled with the liquid.
Olive oil
Blends with the flour to coat its particles, helping it mix in smoothly without lumps.
Baking soda
Raises the pH of the acidic tomato juice, mellowing its sharpness and altering its color.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the tomato juice. If the flour is added without being well blended with the oil, it can clump in the hot liquid. Stirring the flour in while the sauce is boiling keeps it dispersed so the starch thickens the sauce evenly.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, sugar, wheat, flour, olive, milk):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, sugar, wheat, flour, olive, milk. 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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