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Creole Sauce

A tomato-based sauce with peppers, ham or bacon, celery seed, onion, parsley, sugar, butter, and bay leaf.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Sauce and ketchup match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,099 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

Creole Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Make the tomato sauce by cooking the tomatoes and passing them through a sieve until thick.

  2. Chop the onion and fry it in butter until yellow.

  3. Add the green and red peppers, tomato sauce, ham, and season with salt and pepper.

  4. Simmer for 30 minutes and serve 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 their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sauce + ketchuptop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,099 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  2. Tomato + celerytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,377 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

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

  4. Celery + oniontop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

Tomato sauce
Forms the liquid base and gives the sauce its body and tomato flavour.
Butter
Fat that carries the onion's flavour and softens it as it fries.
Ham or bacon
Adds savoury, salty depth that seasons the sauce as it simmers.
Green and red peppers
Add fresh, slightly bitter vegetable flavour and some texture to the sauce.

The step that matters

Simmer for 30 minutes. Long simmering lets the tomato sauce thicken and the flavours blend. Too short a simmer leaves the sauce thin and the peppers raw-tasting.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (tomato, sauce, ketchup, pepper, celery, sugar, butter):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Mustardfits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against tomato, sauce, ketchup, pepper, celery, sugar, butter. 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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