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Sauce

Garlic Sauce

A sauce made with demi‑glaze, garlic, sugar, and optional tomato sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and tomato are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,076 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Garlic Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a saucepan, combine the demi‑glaze and tomato sauce.

  2. Bring to a boil and cook for a few minutes.

  3. Add the scraped garlic and sugar.

  4. Stir well and serve.

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

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  3. Clove + tomatotop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  4. Sugar + saucetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,147 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Tomato + saucetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,469 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Demi-glaze
Provides the concentrated, savory meaty base that gives the sauce its body and depth.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma and sharp flavor that mellows somewhat as the sauce cooks.
Sugar
Balances the savory and acidic notes and rounds out the overall flavor.

Swap the tomato

The recipe marks tomato as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (clove, garlic, sugar, sauce):

  1. Mustardfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Horseradishfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against clove, garlic, sugar, sauce. 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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