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Sauce

Tomato Sauce

A tomato sauce made with water or stock, tomatoes, bay leaf, garlic, onion, parsley, butter, flour, salt, and white pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 29,058 recipes mention both. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Stew the vegetables until tender.

  2. Cream the butter in a bowl, then mix in the flour.

  3. Add the butter and flour mixture to the sauce and stir until dissolved.

  4. Let it boil for three minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Strain the sauce around the gateau and serve very hot.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Garlic + parsleytop 4% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together9,308 recipes

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

  4. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Tomato + oniontop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned 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

Strained tomatoes
Provide the main body, acidity and flavour of the sauce.
Butter and flour
Creamed together and stirred in, they thicken the sauce as the starch sets when heated.
Onion
Sweetens and deepens the flavour of the sauce as it stews.

The step that matters

Adding the butter and flour mixture. Flour added directly to hot liquid can form lumps. Creaming it into butter first and stirring until dissolved helps it blend smoothly, and the sauce must then boil so the starch fully thickens and loses its raw floury taste.

Flavor stand-ins for the white pepper

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

  1. Thymebetter flavor fit
  2. Cuminbetter flavor fit
  3. Capersbetter flavor fit
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, clove, garlic, onion, parsley, butter, flour. 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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