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Sauce

Sweet Tomato Sauce

A tomato sauce sweetened with sugar and flavored with lemon, mustard, ginger, cinnamon, parsley, and peppermint.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Sweet Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the tomatoes and onion in enough water to cover for 1 hour.

  2. Add sugar, lemon juice, mustard, ginger, cinnamon, parsley, and peppermint; then strain.

  3. Brown flour in coconut butter or olive oil, then add to the strained liquid.

  4. Boil until slightly thickened.

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 + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Ginger + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

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

  4. Onion + mustardtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,259 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + cinnamontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,950 recipes

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

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 tart flavour of the sauce, softening as they boil.
Flour
Thickens the liquid when browned in fat and stirred into it.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the acidity of the tomatoes and lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.

The step that matters

Browning the flour. Flour cooked in fat until golden loses its raw taste and thickens better, while stirring prevents lumps from forming when the liquid is added.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, sugar, lemon, mustard, ginger, cinnamon, parsley):

  1. Broccolifits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, sugar, lemon, mustard, ginger, cinnamon, parsley. 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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