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Sauce for Omelet

A tomato-based sauce with onion, mushrooms, green pepper, pepper, salt, and optional olives.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Tomato and olive are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 15,539 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Sauce for Omelet

Oven, in the book's wordsA warm oven

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the tomatoes until very dry.

  2. Add the sliced onion, chopped mushrooms, and sliced green pepper.

  3. Season with pepper and coarse sea salt.

  4. Add chopped olives if desired.

  5. This sauce can be made a day in advance and used when needed.

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. Tomato + olivetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,539 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Mushroom + olivetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,571 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Tomato + mushroomtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,719 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

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

  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

Tomatoes
Form the base of the sauce, and stewing them down thickens it by driving off water.
Onion
Adds savory depth and aroma as it softens into the sauce.
Mushrooms
Add earthy savory flavor and a bit of body to the sauce.
Green pepper
Adds fresh, slightly bitter vegetable flavor and texture.

The step that matters

Stew the tomatoes until very dry. Tomatoes are mostly water. Cooking them down long enough evaporates that water and concentrates their flavor, which gives the sauce body instead of a thin, watery texture.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, mushroom, pepper, olive):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Eggplantfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, mushroom, pepper, olive. 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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