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Tomato Sauce

A simple tomato sauce made with tomatoes, onion, carrot, stock, sugar, lemon juice, salt, and cayenne pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the stems from the tomatoes and slice them.

  2. In a pan, combine the sliced tomatoes, onion, carrot, and stock.

Cook and strain

  1. Stew until the tomatoes are soft.

  2. Pass the mixture through a fine sieve.

Season and serve

  1. Season with cayenne pepper, sugar, lemon juice, and salt.

  2. Serve hot in a small tureen or alongside meat.

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + peppertop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,555 recipes

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

  3. Tomato + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,606 recipes

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

  4. Onion + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together21,601 recipes

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

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

Tomatoes
Provide the main body, flavour and liquid base of the sauce as they soften.
Onion
Adds savoury depth and aromatic flavour as it softens with the tomatoes.
Carrot
Adds natural sweetness and body to the sauce during stewing.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the tomatoes.

The step that matters

Pass the mixture through a fine sieve. Straining removes skins, seeds and fibrous pieces, which gives the sauce a smooth texture. Cooking the vegetables until fully soft first makes them pass through the sieve more easily.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, carrot, sugar, lemon, pepper):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Okrafits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, carrot, sugar, lemon, 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.

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