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Tomato Sauce for Omelette

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

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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, salt, and sugar.

  2. Melt the butter in a chafing dish until bubbling hot, then add the flour to the butter and stir well.

  3. Pour in the heated tomatoes and seasoning, and mix thoroughly.

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
Provide the main body and tomato flavour of the sauce.
Butter
Adds richness and fat, and helps form the base for the thickening.
Flour
Thickens the sauce when cooked with the butter, giving it body.

The step that matters

Cooking the butter and flour together. The flour must be stirred into the hot butter so it cooks into a smooth roux before the tomatoes go in. Adding the flour without stirring can leave lumps, and the sauce will not thicken evenly.

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.

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