Skip to main content
Sauce

Tomato Sauce for Omelette

A tomato sauce seasoned with bay leaf, parsley, pepper, salt, sugar, lemon juice, butter, and flour, used for omelettes.

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

Why it works: Parsley and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,037 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Tomato Sauce for Omelette

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat the strained tomatoes with the bay leaf, parsley, pepper, coarse sea salt, sugar, and lemon juice in a saucepan.

  2. Melt the butter in a chafing dish until bubbling hot. Add the flour to the butter and stir until combined.

  3. Pour in the heated tomato mixture and stir until well blended.

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. Parsley + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,037 recipes

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

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

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

  5. Tomato + parsleytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,398 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

Strained tomatoes
Form the base of the sauce, providing moisture and body.
Butter
Fat that cooks with the flour to start the thickening base.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked into the hot butter and tomato liquid.

The step that matters

Add the flour to the butter and stir until combined. Stirring the flour into hot butter coats the starch granules in fat so they disperse evenly. Adding it to the tomato liquid without this step can leave lumps.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, pepper, sugar, lemon, butter, flour):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Okrafits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, pepper, sugar, lemon, butter, flour. 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

Hot Lemon Cream SauceHot Lemon Cream Sauce11 recipesWine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipes