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Tomato Sauce

A tomato-based sauce with butter, garlic, onion, pepper berry, flour, and seasonings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 tomato base

  1. Cook the tomato, water, garlic, pepper berry, and parsley for 15 minutes.

Make the white sauce

  1. Brown the onion in butter in a separate pan.

  2. Add flour to the onion and stir to create a white sauce.

  3. Strain the sauce and combine with the cooked tomato mixture.

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Tomato + peppertop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together17,923 recipes

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

  5. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned 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

Tomato
Provides the main body and tomato flavour of the sauce.
Butter
Carries the onion's flavour and adds richness to the sauce base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the butter and onion.
Onion
Adds savoury aromatic depth after browning in butter.

The step that matters

Add flour to the onion and stir to create a white sauce. Flour must be stirred into the browned butter and onion so it cooks evenly; if it clumps or is not stirred enough, lumps form and the sauce thickens unevenly.

Flavor stand-ins for the berry

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

  1. Avocadobetter flavor fit
  2. Limebetter flavor fit
  3. Cherrybetter flavor fit
  4. Berrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, butter, clove, garlic, onion, pepper, 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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