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Tomato Sauce

A sauce made from butter, flour, tomatoes, onion, bay leaf, salt, pepper, cloves, and mace.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 17,451 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan.

  2. Add the flour and stir until combined.

  3. Pour in the strained tomatoes and add the onion, bay leaf, salt, pepper, cloves, and mace.

  4. Simmer for 15 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the sauce 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

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

  4. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 recipes

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Enriches the sauce and carries flavour, adding richness to the tomatoes.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter, giving it body.
Strained tomatoes
Form the base of the sauce, providing liquid, acidity and most of the flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the flour to the melted butter. Stirring the flour into the butter until smooth cooks it into a roux. Skipping the stirring can leave lumps that do not blend into the sauce evenly.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Turmericfits better
  3. Cinnamonfits better
  4. Macethe original

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