Name: Her Tomato Sauce
Ingredients: 1 cup cream sauce; 2 tablespoons tomato ketchup; chopped parsley

Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 1,099 recipes mention both. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Her Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

1 cup cream sauce
2 tablespoons tomato ketchup
chopped parsley

Directions

Prepare a cream sauce.
Reserve 1 cup of the cream sauce for the omelet.
Add 2 tablespoons of tomato ketchup to the reserved cream sauce.
Sprinkle chopped parsley over the omelet.
Pour the sauce around the omelet before serving.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together1,099 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Tomato + parsleytop 8% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together5,398 recipes

Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).
Cream + saucetop 9% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together4,787 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Cream + ketchuptop 12% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together279 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Sauce + tomatotop 15% of all pairs

Aroma overlaplow

Mentioned together5,469 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the parsley

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (cream, sauce, tomato, ketchup):

Celerybetter flavor fit
Capersbetter flavor fit
Tarragonbetter flavor fit
Parsleythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sauce, tomato, ketchup. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).