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Tomato Sauce

A sauce made from fresh tomatoes, water, salt, pepper, bouquet garni, butter, flour, and stock, simmered and thickened.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and pepper 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

Prepare the tomatoes

  1. Remove the stalks from the tomatoes and squeeze out the juice and seeds.

  2. In a 3‑pint saucepan with a close‑fitting lid, combine the tomatoes, water, salt, pepper, and bouquet garni.

  3. Boil for 20 to 30 minutes, stirring frequently until soft.

  4. Pass the mixture through a wire sieve.

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and stir in the flour for 2 to 3 minutes.

  2. Remove from heat and gradually add the tomato puree, stirring constantly.

  3. Add the stock and boil for 15 minutes, adding more stock if the sauce is too thick.

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Butter + hamtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,475 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

  4. Pepper + flourtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together50,459 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Pepper + buttertop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together85,593 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

Fresh tomatoes
Provide the main body, acidity and flavour of the sauce once cooked down and sieved.
Butter
Enriches the sauce with fat and rounds out its flavour.
Flour
Cooked with the butter to form a roux that thickens the sauce.
Stock
Adds savoury depth and liquid, and loosens the sauce as it thickens.

The step that matters

Adding the tomato puree to the roux. Adding the puree off the heat and stirring constantly keeps the flour smooth, so lumps do not form as the liquid thickens.

Swap the tomato

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, flour, ham. 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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