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Sauce

Nut Sauce for Vegetables

A sauce made from Brazil nuts, tomato, and flour, simmered with hot water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Brazil nut and flour share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Nut Sauce for Vegetables

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Cream the Brazil nuts with warm water.

  2. Gradually stir in nearly 1 pint of hot water.

  3. Mix in ½ cup of stewed and strained tomato.

Cook and thicken

  1. Boil the mixture once.

  2. Thicken with 1 tablespoon of flour and cook for about 6 minutes.

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. Brazil nut + flourtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together43 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Tomato + flourtop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Brazil nut + tomatotop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Brazil nuts
Creamed into the water to give the sauce body, richness and a smooth texture.
Stewed and strained tomato
Adds acidity, colour and a fresh tomato flavour to the sauce.
Flour
Its starch swells when heated in liquid, thickening the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken with flour and cook. Flour thickens only when its starch is heated in the liquid. Adding it cold or stirring poorly can leave lumps, and too little cooking leaves a raw floury taste and a thin sauce.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (brazil nut, flour):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Beetrootfits better
  3. Lettucefits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against brazil nut, flour. 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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