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Tomato Rioe

A tomato sauce with onion, garlic, bay leaves, butter, and spices, served over cold rice and garnished with West Indian pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Tomato Rioe

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Fry the onion, garlic, and bay leaves in butter until pale yellow.

  2. Add tomato pulp, salt, Nepaul pepper, and tarragon vinegar; stir well.

  3. Let it simmer for about 20 minutes, then strain the sauce.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over cold rice, cover, and warm thoroughly.

  2. Serve decorated with bright West Indian pickles.

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. Garlic + tomatotop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Pepper + tarragontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,399 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Clove + tarragontop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together548 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Fat that softens the onion and garlic and carries their flavour into the sauce.
Tomato pulp
Forms the body of the sauce and adds acidity and savoury flavour.
Onion
Provides sweetness and aromatic depth as it cooks gently in butter.
Cold rice
Forms the base that the warm sauce coats and soaks into.

The step that matters

Simmer, then strain the sauce. Simmering lets the tomato lose excess water and concentrate its flavour, so the sauce thickens rather than running thin over the rice. Straining removes solids so the sauce stays smooth.

Swap the clove

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Basilfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, garlic, butter, tomato, pepper, tarragon, vinegar. 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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