Skip to main content
Main

Tomato Sauce

A sauce made with onion, coconut butter, flour, sweet milk, tomato juice, and peanut butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Coconut and peanut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 433 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a skillet, fry the chopped onion in coconut butter until golden brown.

  2. Add the flour and cook until it browns.

  3. Gradually stir in the sweet milk and tomato juice.

  4. Cook until the sauce thickens.

  5. Flavor with the creamed peanut butter mixed with a little milk.

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. Coconut + peanuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together433 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  2. Butter + milktop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together81,283 recipes

    Shared aroma: (z)-4-heptenal (biscuit, cream).

  3. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  4. Onion + peanuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,043 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + peanuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together315 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

Coconut butter
Fat that fries the onion and carries flavor into the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the liquids.
Sweet milk
Forms the liquid base that becomes creamy when thickened.
Tomato juice
Supplies the tomato flavor and acidity to the sauce.
Peanut butter
Adds nutty richness and body to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Brown the flour before adding liquid. Cooking the flour until it browns in the fat removes raw starch taste and builds color and nutty flavor. Stirring in the milk and juice gradually keeps lumps from forming as the starch thickens the sauce.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (onion, coconut, butter, flour, milk, peanut):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, coconut, butter, flour, milk, peanut. 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.

More tomato sauce recipes

Green 40Beef in 13Eggs in 13French 8Sweetbreads in 7Spiced 6 See all 512 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipesCream Tomato SoupCream Tomato Soup28 recipes