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Tomato Toast

A tomato sauce served over buttered toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Tomato Toast

Ingredients

Directions

Make the tomato sauce

  1. Pare and stew the tomatoes until smooth.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and butter.

  3. Add the sweet cream and flour, and let it scald without boiling.

  4. Remove from heat immediately.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over well-buttered toast slices.

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. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

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

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Tomato + breadtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,013 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ripe tomatoes
Provide the main body and sweet, acidic flavor of the sauce.
Sweet cream
Adds richness and a smooth, creamy texture to the sauce.
Flour
Thickens the liquid so the sauce coats the toast rather than running off.
Butter
Adds fat and flavor to the sauce and enriches the buttered toast.

The step that matters

Scalding without boiling. Once the cream and flour go in, boiling can curdle the cream and cause the flour to clump or taste raw. Heating just until steaming hot keeps the sauce smooth, and removing it from heat right away prevents it from reducing or breaking.

Swap the tomato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pepper, butter, cream, flour, bread):

  1. Leekfits better
  2. Spinachfits better
  3. Shallotfits better
  4. Tomatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pepper, butter, cream, flour, bread. 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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