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Tomato Sauce

A tomato sauce made by stewing tomatoes with cloves, parsley, pepper, and salt, then thickened with butter, flour, and soup stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tomato base

  1. Stew the tomatoes with cloves, parsley, pepper, and salt; strain the mixture.

Make the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat until it bubbles.

  2. Add the flour and stir.

  3. Cook until done.

  4. Add the strained tomato pulp and stir until smooth.

  5. Thin with soup stock.

  6. Serve hot with fish cutlets.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  5. Tomato + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,398 recipes

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

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, flavour and pulp of the sauce.
Butter
Carries flavour and enriches the sauce with fat for a smoother mouthfeel.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the melted butter, giving it body.
Soup stock
Thins the thickened sauce to the desired consistency and adds savoury depth.

The step that matters

Cook the butter and flour before adding tomato. Cooking the flour in melted butter until it bubbles cooks out its raw starch taste and lets it thicken properly. Adding the tomato too early, or before the roux is cooked, can leave the sauce tasting floury and lumpy.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, parsley, pepper, butter, 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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