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Spaghetti Sauce

A tomato-based sauce with onions, garlic, spices, butter, and parsley, served over spaghetti.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Spaghetti Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cook the chopped onions in a pan until they form a thick paste, then strain.

  2. Bring the strained mixture to a boil, adding garlic, peppercorns, cloves, and bay leaves.

  3. In a separate pan, quickly fry the butter and parsley together, then add the fried mixture to the sauce.

  4. Strain the sauce through a sieve.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over cooked spaghetti.

  2. Make the sauce while the spaghetti is cooking to serve hot.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  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

Onions
Cook down into a thick paste that gives the sauce its body and sweetness.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, carrying flavor through the finished sauce.
Tomato paste
Adds concentrated tomato flavor, color, and body to the sauce.

The step that matters

Cooking the onions into a thick paste. Onions must cook long enough to soften and lose their raw sharpness, and the paste must be thick enough to give the sauce body. Undercooked onions leave a harsh flavor and a thin sauce.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, onion, garlic, butter, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, onion, garlic, butter, parsley. 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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