Skip to main content
Sauce

Shirley Sauce

A tomato and pepper sauce with vinegar, garlic, Tabasco, and cornstarch thickening.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Shirley Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the tomatoes.

  2. Chop the peppers and onion.

Cook and strain

  1. Boil the tomatoes, peppers, and onion in vinegar for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the mixture.

Finish the sauce

  1. Add garlic, Tabasco sauce, and cornstarch to the strained mixture. Stir well to combine.

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. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

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

  5. Pepper + garlictop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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, moisture and tangy flavour of the sauce.
Red peppers
Add sweetness, colour and fresh vegetable flavour to the sauce.
Onion
Adds savoury depth and aroma as it softens during boiling.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sauce and helps preserve it.
Cornstarch
Thickens the strained liquid into a smoother, more viscous sauce.

The step that matters

Stir the cornstarch into the strained mixture. Cornstarch thickens only when heated in liquid and then stirred to distribute evenly, so clumps can form if it is not blended thoroughly before the sauce sets.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, pepper, onion, vinegar, sugar, garlic, sauce):

  1. Cuminfits better
  2. Corianderfits better
  3. Tarragonfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, pepper, onion, vinegar, sugar, garlic, sauce. 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.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes