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Tomato Sauce

A savory sauce made from onions, bay leaf, green pepper, tomatoes, butter, flour, salt, pepper, and optional baking soda.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,923 recipes. Both carry 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells earthy, pea. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Cook the onion, bay leaf, and green pepper with the tomatoes for 15 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture through a colander.

  3. In a saucepan, melt the butter and add the flour, cooking together.

  4. Season with salt and pepper.

  5. If the sauce is very acidic, add a pinch of baking soda.

Serve

  1. Serve with breaded meat, chops, omelets, or cold chopped lamb or mutton.

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. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  2. Onion + tomatotop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

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

  4. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Onion + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together42,912 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they 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, flavor, and acidity of the sauce.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and carries flavor through the sauce.
Flour
Cooked with butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Baking soda
Neutralizes acidity in the tomatoes if the sauce tastes too sharp.

The step that matters

Cooking the butter and flour together. The flour must cook in the melted butter long enough to lose its raw starchy taste and to thicken evenly. Adding it without stirring can leave lumps, and undercooking leaves a pasty flavor.

Swap the tomato

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

  1. Chivefits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Leekfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against onion, 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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