Skip to main content
Main

Tomato Sauce

A savory tomato sauce made with tomatoes, onion, herbs, ham or bacon, butter, sugar, and broth, finished with cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Thyme and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,193 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Remove the stalks from the tomatoes and squeeze them to remove the seeds.

Cook the sauce

  1. In a saucepan, combine the tomatoes, onion, thyme, bay leaf, celery, ham or bacon, butter, sugar, salt, and pepper.

  2. Cook gently over low heat until everything is tender.

  3. Stir in the flour and moisten with the broth, then boil for 5 minutes.

  4. Add a little cayenne pepper and taste for seasoning.

Strain and thicken

  1. Pass the sauce through a sieve or fine strainer.

  2. Return the sauce to the saucepan and cook until it thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon.

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. Thyme + celerytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,193 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Thyme + peppertop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  4. Tomato + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,370 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 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 and fresh tomato flavour of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, rounding out the acidity of the tomatoes.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it is moistened and boiled with the broth.
Broth
Adds liquid and savoury depth, moistening the flour for thickening.
Sugar
Balances the acidity of the tomatoes for a rounder sweetness.
Ham or bacon
Contributes salty, savoury flavour to the sauce base.

The step that matters

Thickening with flour and broth. Flour must be stirred in and moistened fully before boiling, or it forms lumps. Boiling activates its starch so the sauce thickens. Cook until it coats the back of a spoon, since thickness is judged by that sign rather than time.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, thyme, celery, ham, butter, sugar, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Carrotfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, thyme, celery, ham, butter, sugar, pepper. 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.

More tomato sauce recipes

Green 40Beef in 13Eggs in 13French 8Sweetbreads in 7Spiced 6 See all 512 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCream of Celery SoupCream of Celery Soup113 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipes