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Tomato Sauce

A simple tomato sauce made with tomatoes, butter, flour, shallot, clove, sugar, cayenne pepper, salt, water, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and 17,451 recipes mention both. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and stir in the flour until slightly browned.

  2. Add the water, sliced tomatoes, shallot, and remaining ingredients.

  3. Simmer for thirty minutes.

  4. Rub the mixture through a wire sieve, discarding the clove and shallot.

Finish and serve

  1. Season to taste and re-boil for five minutes.

  2. For a richer color, stir in one or two drops of cochineal.

  3. Pour into a sauce boat and serve.

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.

  1. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Shallot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Flour + shallottop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,081 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together17,923 recipes

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

  5. Shallot + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together5,898 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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 colour of the sauce.
Butter
Carries flavour and enriches the sauce with fat.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the liquid.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour into the butter. Cooking the flour in melted butter until slightly browned removes its raw starchy taste and lets it thicken the liquid smoothly. Adding liquid to raw flour clumps easily.

Flavor stand-ins for the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, butter, flour, shallot, sugar, pepper, vinegar):

  1. Tarragonbetter flavor fit
  2. Capersbetter flavor fit
  3. Parsleybetter flavor fit
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, butter, flour, shallot, sugar, pepper, vinegar. 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).

“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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