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Tomato Sauce

A tomato sauce made with butter, carrot, onion, leek, garlic, sugar, lemon juice, ham, tomatoes, and thickened with rice flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 29,058 recipes mention both. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the vegetables

  1. Wash and scrape the carrot thinly, then cut it into small pieces.

  2. Skin, scald, and slice the onion, leek, and garlic.

Make the sauce

  1. In a pan, melt the butter and add the carrot, onion, leek, garlic, sugar, lemon juice, and ham.

  2. Pour in the tin of tomatoes and simmer slowly until soft enough to pass through a sieve.

  3. Rub the mixture through a sieve and return the juice to a clean pan.

  4. Thicken the juice with the rice flour, allow it to boil, 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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Carrot + leektop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,310 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Onion + leektop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,326 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  4. Leek + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together150 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Carrot + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together5,873 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Melts to form the fat base that carries the vegetable flavours.
Tomatoes
Form the main body and acidity of the sauce once simmered and sieved.
Rice flour
Thickens the strained juice as it comes to a boil, giving the sauce body.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma as it softens in the butter.

The step that matters

Simmer until soft, then sieve. The vegetables must be fully soft before rubbing through a sieve; undercooked pieces will not pass through and leave a grainy texture.

Flavor stand-ins for the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, carrot, onion, leek, clove, garlic, sugar):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadoabout as good a flavor fit

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, carrot, onion, leek, clove, garlic, sugar. 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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