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Tomato Sauce

A tomato sauce flavored with butter, onions, carrots, ham, parsley, thyme, pepper, bay leaves, and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over medium heat.

  2. Add the onions, carrots, and ham; fry until browned.

  3. Stir in the tomatoes, parsley, thyme, pepper, bay leaves, and salt.

  4. Cover and cook slowly until the tomatoes are soft.

Thicken and strain

  1. Thicken the sauce with flour diluted in cold broth to the desired consistency.

  2. Stir well until it boils, then let it cook slowly for 30 minutes.

  3. Remove the ham and parsley bundle, and strain the sauce through a fine sieve.

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. Parsley + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Carrot + thymetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds fat and richness, and helps the vegetables brown in the pan.
Ham
Browns in the fat and adds savory, smoky flavor to the sauce.
Tomatoes
Form the body of the sauce and provide its acidity and fresh flavor.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it is diluted and heated, giving it body.

The step that matters

Thicken with diluted flour. Flour added directly to hot liquid clumps. Mixing it into cold broth first lets the starch disperse evenly, so it thickens smoothly when the sauce boils.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, ham, tomato, parsley, thyme, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Parsnipfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, ham, tomato, parsley, thyme, pepper. 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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