Skip to main content
Sauce

Tomato Sauce for Fritters

A tomato sauce made with tomatoes, onion, butter, flour, salt, and pepper, used to coat fritters.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Tomato and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and 17,923 recipes mention both. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce for Fritters

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cook the onion and tomatoes in a pot for 15 minutes.

  2. Rub the mixture through a sieve to remove solids.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix the butter, flour, salt, and pepper.

  4. Add the butter mixture to the tomato liquid.

  5. Cook until the sauce thickens.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce around the fritters 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.

  1. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  2. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together20,633 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Flour and butter share little aroma chemistry, yet 124,287 recipes mention both: they likely work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Tomatoes
Provide the main body and acidic flavor of the sauce once cooked and strained.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and tomato liquid.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps the flour blend smoothly into the sauce.

The step that matters

Add the butter mixture to the tomato liquid and cook until thickened. Flour needs to be well blended and cooked through to thicken the sauce without lumps or a raw starchy taste. Keep stirring and simmering until it coats a spoon.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, flour, butter, pepper):

  1. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  2. Okrabetter flavor fit
  3. Eggplantbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, flour, butter, pepper. 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).

“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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes