Name: Tomato Sauce
Ingredients: tomatoes; coarse sea salt; black pepper; lemon juice or vinegar; bread; butter; small salad or watercress for garnish

Why it works: Lemon and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and 579 recipes mention both. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Immerse the tomatoes in boiling water for 2 minutes.
Drain and cover the tomatoes with cold water until completely cool.
Dry the tomatoes, remove the skins, and slice them thinly.
Season the slices with salt, pepper, and a splash of lemon juice or vinegar to taste.
Prepare thin slices of buttered bread and cut out rounds of suitable size.
Place slices of tomato between two rounds of bread and press firmly to adhere.
Serve on a decorative dish garnished with small salad or watercress.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Lemon + watercresstop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together579 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together27,047 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together27,232 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).
Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together17,923 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).
Tomato + breadtop 10% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together1,013 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, bread, butter, watercress):

Avocadoabout as good a flavor fit
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, bread, butter, watercress. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).