Skip to main content
Main

Tomato Sauce

A sauce made from tomatoes, spices, carrot, onion, butter, and flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 sauce

  1. Combine the tomatoes, cloves, thyme, parsley, bay leaf, peppercorns, allspice, carrot, and onion in a stew pan.

  2. Boil the mixture for about 20 minutes.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

Thicken and serve

  1. Melt the butter in another pan until bubbling.

  2. Sprinkle the flour into the melted butter and stir until well cooked.

  3. Mix the flour mixture with the tomato pulp.

  4. Serve 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. Thyme + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Thyme + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,077 recipes

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

  4. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together8,053 recipes

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

  5. Clove + thymetop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

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
Adds richness and fat, carrying flavour through the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked in melted butter before being mixed in.

The step that matters

Cooking the flour in the melted butter. The flour must be stirred until well cooked so it loses its raw, pasty taste and thickens smoothly. Adding it raw or undercooked can leave lumps and a floury flavour in the sauce.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

  1. Parsnipbetter flavor fit
  2. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  3. Turnipbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, clove, thyme, parsley, allspice, carrot, butter. 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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesCarrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesCream of Tomato SoupCream of Tomato Soup107 recipesTomato BisqueTomato Bisque61 recipes