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Tomato Sauce

A basic tomato sauce made with ripe tomatoes, onion, herbs, and butter.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and thyme match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,057 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tomato base

  1. Place the tomatoes, salt, pepper, bay leaf, sliced onion, parsley, thyme, and enough water to cover the tomatoes in a saucepan, then add 2 or 3 drops of vinegar.

  2. Put the saucepan on a slow fire and stir for 15 minutes.

  3. Set a sieve over a basin, pour the tomatoes into the sieve, and rub them through to extract the sauce.

Finish the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan over a slow fire.

  2. If desired, dredge in the flour while stirring with a wooden spoon.

  3. Sprinkle in salt and pepper.

  4. Gently pour in the tomato sauce while stirring continuously over a slow fire.

  5. Let it thicken uncovered, adding a few drops of stock if the sauce is too thick.

  6. Serve in a sauceboat.

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 + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + thymetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,585 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Onion + thymetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,171 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

What each ingredient does

Very ripe tomatoes
Provide the main body and flavour of the sauce once cooked and pushed through a sieve.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the finished sauce.
Flour
Optional thickener that helps the butter-sauce mixture hold more body.
Sliced onion
Adds aromatic sweetness and depth as it softens with the tomatoes.

The step that matters

Letting the sauce thicken gently. Pouring the tomato purée into the butter over high heat or stirring too little can scorch or separate it. Slow heat with constant stirring keeps the sauce smooth and lets the starch in the flour thicken it evenly.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, onion, parsley, thyme, vinegar, 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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