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Spaghetti Sauce

A tomato-based sauce for spaghetti made with onions, garlic, peppercorns, cloves, bay leaves, butter, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Spaghetti Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce base

  1. Cook the chopped onions until they form a thick paste.

  2. Strain the onion paste.

  3. Combine the strained onions with the tomato paste, soup, or fresh tomatoes in a pot.

  4. Bring the mixture to a boil.

  5. Add garlic, peppercorns, cloves, and bay leaves to the pot.

Finish and serve

  1. Melt the butter in a separate pan.

  2. Quickly fry the parsley in the melted butter.

  3. Add the fried parsley to the sauce.

  4. Strain the sauce through a sieve.

  5. Pour the sauce over the cooked spaghetti.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

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

  4. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together20,633 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

Onions
Cooked down to a thick paste, they build the sweet, savoury base of the sauce.
Tomato paste
Concentrates tomato flavour and colour and thickens the sauce body.
Butter
Carries the parsley's aroma and adds richness to the finished sauce.

The step that matters

Cook the chopped onions until they form a thick paste.. Onions cooked slowly with little liquid break down and release sugars that brown and sweeten the base. If they are rushed or left wet, the sauce tastes raw and sharp.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, onion, garlic, butter, parsley):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Capersfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, onion, garlic, butter, 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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