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Tomato Sauce

A tomato sauce made with tomatoes, onion, salt, parsley, sugar, red pepper, cloves, allspice, peppercorns, butter, and flour.

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

  1. Cook all ingredients except butter and flour together until tomatoes are soft.

  2. Rub the mixture through a sieve.

  3. Add the strained mixture to the browned flour cooked with butter.

  4. Stir until it boils and is smooth.

  5. Strain again and serve.

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. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together34,122 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Pepper + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

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 and flavour of the sauce once cooked and strained.
Flour
Thickens the sauce as it cooks with the butter and then boils.
Butter
Carries the flour and adds richness and a toasted flavour to the sauce.

The step that matters

Stir until it boils and is smooth. Flour thickens only once it is well dispersed and heated to a boil. Stirring while adding the strained mixture prevents lumps and lets the starch swell evenly into a smooth sauce.

Flavor stand-ins for the onion

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

  1. Carrotbetter flavor fit
  2. Capsicumbetter flavor fit
  3. Shallotbetter flavor fit
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, parsley, sugar, pepper, clove, allspice, 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.

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