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Green Tomato Pickles

Pickled green tomatoes with spices, sugar, and vinegar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and cinnamon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Green Tomato Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the green tomatoes and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.

  2. Let them sit for 24 hours.

  3. Drain the tomatoes and prepare a kettle.

Cook

  1. Layer the tomatoes in the kettle, sprinkling allspice, cloves, mustard seed, ground cinnamon, ginger, black pepper, and brown sugar between layers.

  2. Cover the layered tomatoes with vinegar.

  3. Cook for 30 minutes.

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. Clove + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Allspice + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 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

Green tomatoes
Provide the bulk of the pickle; salting draws out their water so they firm up and take on flavor.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the sharpness of the vinegar and helps build a syrupy liquid.
Vinegar
Supplies acidity that sharpens the flavor and helps keep the pickles tangy and preserved.
Allspice
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavor to the pickled tomatoes.
Cloves
Adds strong aromatic warmth that carries through the cooked tomatoes.
Ground cinnamon
Adds sweet, woody aroma that complements the brown sugar and tomatoes.

The step that matters

Drain the tomatoes after salting. Salt draws water out of the tomatoes by osmosis. Draining off that liquid before layering keeps the pickle from becoming watery and lets the vinegar and sugar season the tomatoes properly.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, allspice, clove, mustard, cinnamon, ginger, pepper):

  1. Horseradishfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Carrotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, allspice, clove, mustard, cinnamon, ginger, pepper. 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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