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Tomato Sauce

A simmered tomato sauce with onions, parsley, bay leaf, celery, and garlic, thickened with butter and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 6,810 recipes mention both. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tomato base

  1. In a saucepan, combine tomatoes, parsley, bay leaf, celery, onion, and cloves.

  2. Simmer for 20 minutes.

  3. Press the mixture through a sieve.

Thicken and season

  1. Melt the butter in a separate pan without browning it.

  2. Add the flour to the melted butter and stir until smooth.

  3. Gradually add the strained tomato juice, cooking and stirring gently until it thickens.

  4. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

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. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together6,810 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together3,377 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Celery + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together16,012 recipes

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

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 flavor of the sauce.
Butter
Carries flavor and enriches the sauce while forming the roux base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as a roux with the melted butter.

The step that matters

Add the strained tomato juice gradually to the roux. Flour must be fully mixed into the melted butter first, then liquid added slowly while stirring, so no lumps form and the sauce thickens smoothly. Gentle cooking keeps the starch from scorching and the sauce from sticking.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, parsley, celery, clove, butter, 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.

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