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Tomato Sauce

A savory sauce made from tomatoes, onion, carrot, turnip, herbs, and butter, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 8,053 recipes mention both. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a pan and add the chopped carrot, turnip, onion, tomatoes, sweet herbs, peppercorns, and parsley.

  2. Fry the mixture for 10 minutes.

  3. Add the flour, stock, salt, and cochineal; simmer slowly for 30 minutes.

Strain and serve

  1. Pass the sauce through a fine sieve, rubbing as much pulp through as possible.

  2. Reheat the sauce 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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + turniptop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,002 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Turnip + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together2,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  4. Onion + turniptop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together7,585 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Tomato + carrottop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together3,606 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

Tomatoes
Provide the main body, acidity and flavour of the sauce.
Butter
Carries the aromatics during frying and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it simmers with the stock.
Onion
Adds savoury depth and sweetness as it softens in the butter.
Carrot
Adds subtle sweetness and body to the base.

The step that matters

Passing the sauce through a fine sieve. Rubbing the cooked vegetables through the sieve forces the pulp into the liquid, giving a smooth, thick texture. Leaving pulp behind or skipping this step leaves the sauce grainy and thin.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, carrot, turnip, butter, flour, parsley):

  1. Parsnipbetter flavor fit
  2. Leekbetter flavor fit
  3. Okrabetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, carrot, turnip, butter, flour, parsley. 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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