Skip to main content
Preserve

Tomato Sauce

A sauce made from tomatoes, water, butter, onion, spices, and flour, simmered and strained.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 7,874 recipes mention both. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tomato base

  1. Combine the first seven ingredients in a pot and cook for 20 minutes.

Make the roux and finish

  1. In a separate pan, brown the onion in butter.

  2. Add the flour and seasonings to the browned onion.

  3. Gradually add the cooked tomato mixture to the onion mixture.

  4. Cook until there is no taste of raw starch.

  5. Strain the sauce.

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 + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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 browning of the onion and adds richness to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as its starch swells when heated with the liquid.
Onion
Adds sweetness and savoury depth when browned in butter.

The step that matters

Cook until there is no taste of raw starch. Flour must be cooked long enough for its starch to swell and lose its raw, pasty flavour. Stopping early leaves the sauce tasting floury and thickening poorly.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, parsley, butter, clove, allspice, flour, pepper):

  1. Carrotbetter flavor fit
  2. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  3. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, parsley, butter, clove, allspice, flour, pepper. 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.

More tomato sauce recipes

Green 40Beef in 13Eggs in 13French 8Sweetbreads in 7Spiced 6 See all 512 →

You might also like

Green Corn PuddingGreen Corn Pudding64 recipesCornmeal mushCornmeal mush12 recipes