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Tomato Sauce

A thickened tomato sauce made with tomato liquor, onion juice, bay leaves, salt, sugar, baking soda, flour, olive oil, and optional milk or cream.

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

  1. Heat the tomato liquor until it is scalding.

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

  3. Boil for 5 minutes, then strain the mixture.

  4. Stir in a pinch of saleratus.

Thicken and finish

  1. Mix the whole-wheat flour with olive oil until well blended.

  2. Stir the flour mixture into the tomato juice and boil until thickened to a cream-like 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 liquor
Forms the liquid base and provides the main tomato flavor of the sauce.
Whole-wheat flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch cooks, giving a cream-like body.
Olive oil
Blends with the flour so it mixes smoothly into the hot liquid without lumping.
Saleratus (baking soda)
Neutralizes some of the tomato's acidity, mellowing the sharp flavor.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into the tomato juice. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps and stays grainy. Blending it first with oil separates the particles, and constant stirring while boiling lets the starch swell evenly into a smooth, thickened sauce.

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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